To find the catalyst for the United States’ economic growth over the past 10 years ââ?¬â?? including the nation’s astounding 26 percent gain in productivity ââ?¬â?? look no further than market flexibility and incentives, says University of Wisconsin Business School Dean Michael Knetter.
Small companies and public sector agencies still have a ways to go before they can match the technology-fueled productivity gains of their corporate peers, agreed experts gathered in Madison for an information technology conference Wednesday.
The scientific community at large recognizes global warming as a genuine phenomenon. Dissenters suggest the increased temperatures might be due to natural climate fluctuation-perhaps the higher temperatures are part of the same cycle that caused the Ice Age long ago. But recent research indicates that Earth’s natural cycles do not sufficiently account for the temperature increases currently observed.
Imagine an airplane piloted by a cluster of brain cells growing in a little glass dish. The scenario sounds unlikely, but in Thomas DeMarse’s lab, the brain cells are already in flight school.
Information-technology businesses are taking apart their processes and putting them back together. With the Fusion 2005 CEO-CIO Symposium on Wednesday just around the corner, some of the experts watching IT in Wisconsin offered their opinions on how the state and its industries will be shaping their business practices as the year progresses.
Closing the achievement gap remains a hot topic in education these days. While statistics suggest that Black and Hispanic students are narrowing the academic-achievement gap that separates them from White and Asian students, the problem persists in schools nationwide.
Some of the nation’s leading microbiologists criticized the National Institutes of Health on Monday for financing a large expansion of research grants on bioterrorism.
Officials at UW-Madison’s School of Medicine are nearing acceptance into a late-stage clinical trial that would allow them to test a promising new drug for stroke victims.
Quoted: Nancy Mathews, professor at UW’s Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
Washington — More than 700 scientists sent a petition on Monday to the director of the National Institutes of Health protesting what they said was the shift of tens of millions of dollars in federal research money since 2001 away from pathogens that cause major public health problems to obscure germs the government fears might be used in a bioterrorist attack.
Not even Meryl Streep could accurately mimic the speech of most born-and-raised Wisconsinites, according to a recent study by a team of linguists from UW-Madison.
Represenatatives of the UW System, UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Marshfield Clinic have agreed to form a consortium in an effort to attract classified and sensitive federal research funds to the state.
Quoted: John Magnuson, UW-Madison limnologist.
It didn’t take a scientist to figure out that grumpy people make others feel lousy, and feeling lousy makes them less productive at work.
In an effort to bring together the strengths of universities, former director of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign�s supercomputer center Daniel A. Reed will bring together a research center aimed at unifying both science and the arts through the benefit of technology.
Harvard University president Lawrence Summers has suffered acrimonious condemnation, and may have jeopardized his job, for suggesting that the underreprentation of women in engineering and some science fields may be due in part to inherent differences in the intellectual abilities of the sexes.
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to UW-Madison Chancellor John Wiley imploring him to cancel plans for a two-year study that would test the effects of Tasers on live pigs.
Several of Wisconsin’s institutions of higher education have agreed to organize a consortium designed to attract classified and sensitive federal research funds to the state. The Wisconsin Technology Council will be the administrative headquarters of the Wisconsin Security Research Consortium, according to a memorandum of agreement. Representatives of the University of Wisconsin System, UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee, the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Marshfield Clinic have signed the agreement.
Giant tube worms and underwater volcanoes are among topics that Edward Baker, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, will discuss today at a public lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Journal Sentinel interviews Baker.
Dear Editor: What’s this crap about using pigs to test the casualty rate regarding the use of Tasers? What’s a pig going to tell you after being shot up with drugs, then zapped by a 50,000-volt electrical charge?
If it’s not dead, it’ll just squeal like hell to register a relative discomfort at being electrocuted.
The topic of discussion at a special seminar Wednesday night given by Jonathan Patz, MD, MPH, of the University of Wisconsin department of population health sciences and Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, centered on the emergence of disease from global ecological change.
A University of Wisconsin professor plans to test his hypothesis that deaths occurring after Taser use are not a result of the darts but instead caused by the drugs present in the person�s system.
The recent controversy over whether Taser guns can kill justifies the use of pigs in a study, said a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher.
Over the past three years, more than 70 people in North America have died after being shocked by Tasers, according to the human rights group Amnesty International. But John Webster questions whether Tasers were really the cause of death. Many of those people were high on drugs, namely cocaine, argued the emeritus professor of biomedical engineering.
Quoted: Professor of pediatrics Dr. Norman Fost, director of UW-Madison’s medical ethics program.
A condom for fire hoses. A grenade that eats oxygen. A transmitter to help firefighters navigate a smoke-filled room. Only the last one won $10,000.
Three College of Engineering students created FireSite, a radio-like guide that lets firefighters “see” through smoke. The students, who won the 2005 Schoof’s Prize for Creativity this February, say any of us can come up with creative a ideas that can make a difference.
A stellar flare that originated before the dawn of recorded human history delivered a mighty burst of energy to the Earth last December, astronomers announced Friday.
‘Eat your fruits and vegetables:’ Most Americans know that’s good advice, but are the nation’s college-age adults listening? Story focuses on UW-Madison nurtitional scientist Susan Nitzke’s study, designed the increase fruit and vegetable consumption among economically disadvantaged young adults.
Climate change, according to UW-Madison researcher Jonathan Patz, is about a lot more than melting ice caps.
It’s also about people getting sick.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science wants to know if scientists believe that academe’s growing pursuit of patents, and related practices for commercializing research, “are aiding or hindering the progress of science.”
Quoted: John Young, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and director of the State Climatology Office.
California may be the state ready to spend $3 billion on stem cell research, but Wisconsin is in line to get a piece of that action. The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation may be positioned to play a big role in, and perhaps even profit from, the huge cash infusion California is making in stem cell research.
The Undergraduate Biological Research Society’s Thursday night lecture evolved from a stem-cell research presentation into a heated discussion concerning ethics and morality.
SAN FRANCISCOÃ? Feb 17, 2005 ââ?¬â?Ã? San Diego researchers recently confirmed scientifically what biologists knew intuitively: The stem cell lines President Bush approved for federally funded research are contaminated by the mouse “feeder cells” used to make them grow in the lab.
Researchers with UW-Madison and a private stem-cell research center have removed at least one of the potential stumbling blocks that stand in the way of testing human therapies promised by human embryonic stem cells.
For years, the promise of embryonic stem cells has been corrupted by the inescapable reality that most, if not all, lines of those cells are so contaminated by animal cells that they never would be usable for human research. But scientists at the WiCell Research Institute and University of Wisconsin-Madison may have leaped over a substantial hurdle in the dream to someday use those cells to treat human diseases.
University of Wisconsin-Madison and WiCell researchers have developed a way to grow human embryonic stem cells without using large amounts of mouse cells, which could contaminate the lines.
It’s a significant step because a recent study by University of California-San Diego researchers showed that human embryonic stem cells used for research have been contaminated with the animal cells in which they were grown. That made them acceptable for use in research, but not for potential clinical applications.
WHEN Krishna Ella went to venture capitalists in 1995 he was laughed out of their offices. A molecular biologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he was proposing to make hepatitis B vaccine in India, his native land, for a mere dollar a shot.
The Dept. of Justice has already issued a grant to John G. Webster, a biomedical engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin, to study the health effects of Tasers. That research is to be completed in 2006.
Next month President Bush will present both the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of TechnologyÃ?Â-the nation’s highest awards in those fields-to affiliates of UW-Madison.
What will likely become the world’s largest scientific instrument successfully passed the first round of its construction Tuesday from 1.5 miles beneath the surface of Antarctic ice, thanks in part to UW-Madison.
The clock counts down to May for California’s audacious $3 billion experiment in funding stem cell research. That’s when Robert Klein, the architect of the program and acting president of the newly organized California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, hopes to begin cutting the first checks.
States have long worried about how far to go in attracting jobs, with the debate focused mainly on tax incentives and other corporate giveaways. Now, as states gamble billions on controversial stem cell research to attract coveted biotech jobs, they’re confronting an issue rare in job development: moral values.
When explorer Robert Scott reached the South Pole in 1912, he looked around and said “Great God! This is an awful place!”
A professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is among the recipients of the 2003 National Medal of Science, while the university’s patenting and licensing arm has won a 2003 National Medal of Technology, the school announced Tuesday. Carl de Boor, a computer scientist and mathematician, was informed about his medal by President Bush’s science adviser, John Marburger, via telephone. He’ll receive the honor, considered the nation’s most prestigious science award, during a White House ceremony on March 14.
WASHINGTON ââ?¬â?? Four Californians were given the nation’s highest honor for science on Monday, winning the 2003 National Medal of Science.
Carl R. De Boor, of University of Wisconsin, Madison, who won for mathematics was also a winner.
Hector DeLuca may be retiring as chairman of the biochemistry department, but the man who brought the University of Wisconsin millions in royalties will continue to do what he does best.
DeLuca will remain on the faculty as a researcher, studying the healing properties of vitamin D compounds. DeLuca, 74, said he had to scale back because he has been undergoing chemotherapy for a treatable form of lymphoma.
Madison, Wis. ââ?¬â? A blend of mobile, electronic learning techniques could be the future of education.
Judy Brown, an analyst of emerging technology for the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Academic ADL Co-Lab, spoke to the Madison chapter of the World Future Society last Thursday night about the developing trend dubbed ââ?¬Å?me learningââ?¬Â.
Madison, Wis. ââ?¬â? Tools for firefighters and fishermen won the day at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Innovation Days contest for engineering undergraduates.
In the film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a computer named HAL ran an entire spaceship. Likewise, at the Biotron, one of UW-Madison’s most advanced research facilities, an enormous server directs all building operations. Conditions need to be finely controlled because the Biotron houses some of the most revolutionary research conducted quietly on campus.
The annual Polar Plunge makes its way to Madison’s Lake Monona Saturday. The cold-water dive raises money for Special Olympics and also lets participants face their fears and test their limits in a challenging-but eminently harmless-environment.
Madison will be well represented when the presidents honors the country’s top contributors to science and technology next month.
Congress should make sure that the new administrator of the National aeronautics and Space Administration takes a fresh look at a possible reprieve for the Hubble space telescope.
SAN FRANCISCO — Last fall, a group of pioneering scientists, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs sold Californians on the ultimate startup, one with shoot-for-the-moon ambitions. The men and women pitched the state’s residents on a new science that they said might one day lead to cures for humankind’s worst diseases. “Save Lives with Stem Cells!” campaign posters urged.
Chair of the University of Wisconsin biochemistry department, Hector DeLuca, announced Friday he will be stepping down from his administrative position.
If you’re trying to find fish or firefighters, Friday was a day that could signal a leap forward in technology.
A homing device designed to help firefighters find their way out of smoky, burning buildings and a high-tech fishing lure took top honors Friday at UW-Madison’s 11th annual Innovation Days competition.
UW-Madison scientist Hector DeLuca, an international authority on vitamin D whose patents have earned the university millions in royalties, will step down in July as chairman of the biochemistry department he has led for the past 35 years.
Those who approve animal studies at the University of Wisconsin say there are reasons to give professor John Webster the green light to test the effects of TASER’s on pigs.
As far as Gov. Jim Doyle is concerned, the future for stem-cell research in Wisconsin couldn’t be brighter.
Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts said this week that he opposes a controversial type of research on human embryonic stem cells and may propose a state ban that would affect several institutions, including Harvard University.
BOSTON, Feb. 10 – Massachusetts Democrats and several prominent researchers unleashed a flurry of objections on Thursday to Gov. Mitt Romney’s proposal to outlaw a form of embryonic stem cell research.
