For over four years, scientists have been arguing over whether or not to do experiments that could make more dangerous forms of certain viruses — influenza, SARS, or MERS — that could potentially start a pandemic in people if those creations got out of the lab.
Science has learned that the letters, sent by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), targeted U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins and NIH researcher Stephen Suomi, revealing their home addresses and phone numbers and urging their neighbors to call and visit them. The tactic is the latest attempt by the animal rights group to shut down monkey behavioral experiments at Suomi’s Poolesville, Maryland, laboratory, and critics say it crosses the line.
John Hawks is the Vilas-Borghesi Distinguished Achievement Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He talks about his role in the recent discovery of Homo Naledi in the caves of South Africa!
NIH Director Francis Collins, writing about the difficulty of screening new drugs for toxicity: “As an important step in this direction, NIH-funded researchers at the Morgridge Institute for Research and University of Wisconsin-Madison have produced neural tissue chips with many features of a developing human brain.”
(UW–Madison) Professor John Hawks described the creature’s features and explained where the Homo naledi species fitted into the Homo family tree.
John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said: “Overall, Homo naledi looks like one of the most primitive members of our genus, but it also has some surprisingly human-like features, enough to warrant placing it in the genus Homo.”
Ian Sample speaks to Professor Lee Berger, who led the Wits University expeditions which discovered and recovered the fossils; to Professor John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a senior author on the paper describing the new species; and to Professor Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London to assess how significant Homo naledi might be in shedding light on our origins and on the diversity our the human genus.
John Hawks (UW–Madison anthropology professor), a researcher on the team, said that despite some of its modern features, Homo naledi probably belonged at the origins of our genus, Homo. “It’s telling us that evolutionary history was probably different to what we had imagined,” he said.
“Homo naledi had a tiny brain, about the size of an average orange, perched atop a very slender body,” said John Hawks, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a senior author on the academic paper detailing the new species.
Professor John Hawks said the biology of the fossils showed signs of very early man and simultaneously were close to modern humans. “It looks like no other hominid we have ever found before,” said Hawks.
There was no damage to the bones, no predator bite marks or broken bones and there are no other fossils other than those from a few mice and bird remains. “Such a situation is unprecedented in the fossil hominin record,” said Prof John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a senior author.
One of the largest misconceptions about anxiety is that the disorder is something people “bring upon themselves,” a concept that is as malignant as it is incorrect. Adding to the evidence against this isolating stereotype, a new study from the University of Wisconsin, Madison found that the brain function that underlies anxiety and depression may be inherited.
Dr. William Murphy, co-director of the Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told VICE News that regenerative technologies capable of healing battlefield injuries are already undergoing clinical trials.
“It’s really hard to get accurate distance measurements in astronomy and we only have a handful of methods,” says Sebastian Heinz of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who led the study. “But just as bats use sonar to triangulate their location, we can use the X-rays from Circinus X-1 to figure out exactly where it is.”
UW–Madison faculty members Allyson J. Bennett, Marina E. Emborg, Jon E. Levine and Robert Shapiro, in a letter to the editor addressing criticism of animal research: “Animal research is an issue that requires thoughtful, serious consideration based on accurate information and an understanding of what is at stake for the public that benefits from scientific and medical progress.”
UW–Madison chemistry professor Samuel H. Gellman, engineering professor William L. Murphy and bacteriology professor Katrina T. Forest have created and tested amino acids that could serve as cheaper, longer-lasting substitutes for antibodies in drugs (like some cancer treatments) that target large proteins in the body.
Quoted, in a story on the importance of engineering jobs and education, John Archambault, assistant dean for engineering student development at the UW-Madison College of Engineering: “It’s really about wanting to help people. It’s a helping profession.”
From the outside, [UW–Madison Biological Safety Officer] Jim Turk looks like a regular guy, but he’s fighting the autoimmune disease that he describes as invisible.
The Internet of Things will connect everyone and everything like never before. Through an innovative new education lab in America’s heartland, the University of Wisconsin is preparing the next generation of engineers to harness it.
“What’s interesting are the age gaps,” says public communications expert Dominique Brossard, of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, by email. “It might be that relative to other age groups, higher proportions of millennials have no problem accepting science in some areas especially if it fits their life choices but rejecting it in others, such as vaccinations.”
Dominique Brossard, a professor in the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Department of Life Sciences Communication, said she is beginning to see some junior faculty include outreach activities in their tenure packages, and while the response to these efforts can vary depending on factors including discipline, the makeup of the committee, and the institution, “it’s regarded in a more positive light than it was a number of years ago. … Things are changing more slowly in some disciplines than others, but overall I think there is a trend.”
Dominique Brossard, a professor of life sciences communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied commenting, cautioned against drawing too many conclusions about sexism from Dr. Moss-Racusin’s study.
Quoted, University of Wisconsin–Madison psychologist Janet Hyde: “I don’t think [the authors] give sufficient credence” to the experimental results about implicit bias and stereotype threat, Hyde says. “I think they just didn’t take it seriously enough. … They too readily dismiss evidence of sexism in academic science.”
Justin Vandenbroucke, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Levi Simons, director of citizen science at the LA Makerspace in Los Angeles, lead one group, which for the past four years has been working to build an app that teachers and students can use to create their own cosmic ray experiments. It’s called DECO, Distributed Electronic Cosmic-ray Observatory.
One of the most prominent laboratories conducting gain-of-function studies is run by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a flu researcher at the University of Wisconsin?Madison.
[T]here?s a big difference between a 40-bed community hospital and a 900-bed hospital like Texas Presbyterian or a big medical center affiliated with a university, said Dr. Dennis Maki, a University of Wisconsin-Madison infectious disease specialist and former head of hospital infection control.
Several UW-Madison researchers are studying ALS, including four whose work has been supported by the ALS Association in recent years: pharmacist Jeffrey Johnson, comparative bioscientist Masatoshi Suzuki, microbiologist Randal Tibbetts and neuroscientist Su-Chun Zhang.
The real challenge right now, says Alta Charo, professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is stopping the current outbreak using available methods.
?The reason we proposed the concept of dark matter is because we cannot explain the total mass of the universe,? says Swagato Banerjee, a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin. ?And the only way we know how fundamental particles acquire mass is through the Higgs mechanism. So if dark matter is fundamental, it has to interact with the Higgs to acquire mass, at least in our known framework.?
Jake Vander Zanden knows how tricky it can be to discover a new invasive species ? not just in the Great Lakes but in relatively tiny inland lakes as well. The professor at the University of Wisconsin’s renowned Center for Limnology has an office on the shore of Lake Mendota. Limnology is the study of inland lakes, and that makes Mendota one of the most exhaustively studied water bodies on the globe.
An isolated hail storm late Monday and early Tuesday forced snow plows onto the roads of Door County and caused significant crop damage.
Matt Stasiak, superintendent of the [UW-Madison] Peninsular Agriculture Research Station three miles north of Sturgeon Bay, said the hail storm destroyed virtually every crop at the facility and likely caused over $1 million in damage.
Two years ago, after returning home to the University of Wisconsin?Madison from a research trip in the forests of equatorial Africa, Tony Goldberg discovered an unwanted souvenir. There was a tick, the size of a pencil eraser, nestled inside his right nostril.
Bill Murphy, co-director of the Stem Cell & Regenerative Medicine Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where the first human embryonic stem cells were isolated, agreed.
?The advances in human iPS cells are really quite exciting,? he said. ?But I would say there?s remaining value in human embryonic stem cell research.?
In a letter to the editor of The Cap Times, Ron Kalil, UW?Madison professor of neuroscience, questions the newspaper’s judgment in publishing a guest opinion piece by a Virginia psychologist critical of a pair of UW?Madison researchers.
A letter to the editor from Eric Sandgren, director of the UW?Madison Research Animal Resource Center, in response to an opinion piece written by an animal rights advocate about monkey research.
UW-Madison Consumer Science Professor Nancy Wong explains the appeal of “secret menu” items to customers and restaurants.
Michael Alkire, associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of California, Irvine, was one of the first people involved in the search for neural correlates of consciousness, back in the 1990s. He?s particularly excited now about a study published in August by an international team of researchers based at the University of São Paulo and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Joy Zedler carefully planned the three experimental wetlands at the University of Wisconsin?Madisons Arboretum to be identical: parallel marshes 295 feet long and 15 feet wide, carved by engineers into the green landscape. Zedlers contractors planted all three tracts with similar species to see how the vegetation would absorb and clean water runoff during storms.
When Great Oaks Venture Capital decided to expand its reach and build digital start-up companies in Wisconsin, it didn?t take long for the New York firm to figure out where to begin: Madison. Andy Boszhardt Jr. and John Philosophos, two University of Wisconsin-Madison alumni, turned to their alma mater?s highly regarded computer science department to collaborate on a venture that invests in and supports technology companies launched by student entrepreneurs.
Move over, Lucy: Researchers say Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus may also be in the sky, with diamonds.The atmospheres of these gas-ball planets have the perfect temperature and pressure conditions to host carbon in the form of diamond, say Mona Delitsky of California Specialty Engineering in Pasadena, California, and Kevin Baines of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“People experiencing an increase in anxiety show a decrease in the perceived pleasantness of odors,” study co-author Dr. Wen Li, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a written statement. “It becomes more negative as anxiety increases … We encounter anxiety and as a result we experience the world more negatively.”
High levels of stress makes can make the world stink ? literally. In an effort to map the human sense of smell, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have discovered that anxiety and stress may temporarily rewire the brain by linking olfaction to emotion. As a result, neutral scents begin to take on malodorous characteristics.
Words that make objects appear from thin air are generally the stuff of the magical worlds of Harry Potter or The Hobbit. But a new experiment (by Gary Lupyan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison) has been shown that words can make objects easier to recognise, as our sense of vision can be altered by other sensory inputs.
8. Madison, WI … Happiness hub: The University of Wisconsin?Madison Arboretum, which includes prairies, savannas, and 20 miles of trails
A leaked early version of a major forthcoming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations-affiliated panel of scientists that is often cited as the world?s top authority on global warming, is grabbing headlines this week. [Includes comment from Jim Kossin, one of the report’s authors and research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.]
Buried deep in the ice below the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, IceCube is the world?s largest and most remote neutrino observatory.
People who suffer sudden cardiac arrest at a fitness center are more likely to survive than those stricken at other indoor locations such as restaurants or malls, according to a new study by Dr. Richard Page, chairman of the department of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
SatCam is one of several smartphone apps which hope to take user submitted data to improve weather research and forecasting. However, it?s the only one so far to give something directly back to the user in return.
Because I?m such an unabashed weather geek, I check in most days with the awesome blog of the [UW-Madison’s] Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. This morning was no exception, and what I found was a short post about a possible midget typhoon in the western Pacific Ocean.
