A National Institutes of Health grant–the largest of its kind in the country–that promotes graduate training in biotechnology has been renewed for an additional five years.

Professional athletes, including cyclists and distance runners, will soon have a powerful new tool to predict energy expenditure and performance over a race. The technology also has potential medical applications, including helping to treat obese children and adults and cardiac patients.

Ants that tend and harvest gardens of fungus have been closely studied for dozens of years, and are often cited as a model system for symbiosis. However, two other key players-an antibiotic-producing bacteria and a garden parasite, which have likely been co-evolving with the ants and the fungus for tens of millions of years-have been identified in recent years.

When it comes to onions, most of us want it both ways-we want to have our onion and eat it, too. We want the health benefits that onions provide without the pungency, which can cause halitosis, heartburn and hyperactive tear ducts. University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher Michael Havey and his colleagues in Argentina and Turkey are interested in developing a sweet, less pungent onion that does a body good.

A CALS research partnership with a local manufacturer of cycling products has resulted in a generous donation of new equpiment for University of Wisconsin Sports Medicine physical therapy patients.

Given the number of human pharmaceuticals and hormones that make their way into wastewater, some people are concerned about how well treatment plants that turn sewage into reusable water remove these chemicals. New research shows that wastewater treatment plants that employ a combination of purifying techniques followed by reverse osmosis do a good job of removing chemicals that may elicit health effects.

Mosquito abatement usually means one thing: blasting the pesky critters with pesticides. Those pesticides, although highly effective, can impair other organisms in the environment. Que Lan, insect physiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her colleagues in the entomology department are working on a new, more targeted approach to mosquito control: inhibiting their ability to metabolize cholesterol.

A University of Wisconsin-Madison bacteriology professor has created a web-based textbook from 30 years’ worth of lecture notes, making a wealth of information — written in an easy-to-understand style — about everything from anthrax to whooping cough available for students, teachers, scientists and information seekers from around the world.

There are only 27 programs in the country, they only graduate on average a handful of students every year, and the graduates have a 100-percent job-placement rate six weeks after they receive their degrees. The program is genetic counseling and the University of Wisconsin-Madison is at the forefront of training genetic counselors to meet the growing demand for such specialists in the healthcare field.

A cellular structure discovered 125 years ago and dismissed by many biologists as “cellular garbage” has been found to play a key role in the process of cytokinesis, or cell division, one of the most ancient and important of all biological phenomena.