The University of Wisconsin-Madison's patenting arm has settled a patent infringement lawsuit against computer chip maker Intel Corp. involving technology used in a popular computer processor...

University of Wisconsin officials have watered down proposed conflict of interest rules, allowing orthopedic surgeons and other doctors who implant devices to earn large sums of money making presentations for medical device companies. The new policy would keep in place a ban on UW doctors giving talks about medications for drug companies. Not addressed in the policy is the university's own relationship with the drug industry, which has come under scrutiny in a series of stories this year by the Journal Sentinel...

The 2009 Badger football season marked the introduction of University Communications’ radio show “UW-Madison Minute.” Big Ten Network project manager Peter Kleppin said “UW-Madison Minute,” hosted by senior Emily Smolarek, is meant to expose people from all over the country to the Wisconsin Idea...

...Exhibit one is the almost total failure of local media to notice that William Cronon, a UW-Madison professor of history, geography and environmental studies, has a standout role in all six episodes of Ken Burns' stunning series "The National Parks: America's Best idea"...

A $435,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation program will support research by Lawrence University and University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley scientists and students...

UW-Madison received two major donations worth a combined $1.3 million to help build a new nursing science center, according to a university news release...

...The students are participating for the second year in the Memory Project, which connects student-artists with orphans overseas and makes sure they have a keepsake to call their own...The program is the brainchild of Ben Schumaker, a graduate student from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was inspired to start the Memory Project while volunteering in Guatemala in 2003...

Those who want to make agriculture their future aren't being scared away by the tough times hitting the dairy industry...

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has defended a professor's $219 purchase of the complete set of the 1960s series "Get Smart" as appropriate. The Legislative Audit Bureau discovered the purchase of the 25-DVD set by a business professor during a review of credit card spending...

UW-Whitewater junior Matt Lesperance was looking forward to having friends and family cheer for his wheelchair basketball team in Chicago at the 2016 Summer Paralympics...The Paralympics are hosted by the same city as the Summer Olympics...The national team included five UW-Whitewater alumni, Lesperance, senior Nate Hinze and UW-Whitewater head coach Jeremy Lade...

The Unviersity of Wisconsin-Green Bay will host a series of events designed to raise awareness of issues faced by gays and lesbians...

Students at the University of Wisconsin-Stout recently scored a first-place finish in a national design competition with a pair of pants that could one day save lives...

Health care providers and media watchdogs are questioning plans by a Madison television station to showcase doctors who pay for advertising as the top experts in their fields...Lisa Brunette, a spokeswoman for UW Health, which first publicly criticized the pitch, said it appears to be a "pay for play" in which doctors give the station money in exchange for positive publicity...

With contract negotiations looming, the union that represents part-time instructors at Madison Area Technical College decided to crunch some numbers. "We always knew we were badly underpaid compared to the full-time teachers but this was the first year that we really took a hard, serious look at the compensation trends between part-time and full-time teachers," says Mike Kent, a part-time lecturer at MATC since 2005 and president of the MATC Part-time Teachers Union...

...You're still far more likely to be employed with a bachelor's degree than if you're a high school dropout. But in a telling sign of the breadth of the recession, the latest data also indicate that the numbers of unemployed jobseekers are growing fastest among Americans with higher education..."It's still worth pursuing a bachelor's degree because the returns in terms of earnings are greater," Adams said. "Plus, if you do lose your job and you have a degree, you're going to be able to find a job much more easily. You'll just have more options as we move into an economic recovery."

...Since the recession began 21 months ago, the number of unemployed school dropouts, 25 and older, rose 99% to 1.8 million. Among those with bachelor’s degrees and higher, the number surpassed 2.2 million, an increase of 136%. “Recessions are becoming a bit more egalitarian,” Scott Adams, a labor economist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told me. “It certainly has been hitting people of all education levels. And no longer is it the case that just having a bachelor’s degree shields you from economic downturns”...

In the last two decades, more than a million families around the country have invested in state funds that pledged to cover the cost of attending their state’s public colleges and universities, regardless of how much tuition increased. But in the last year, the stock market slump and rising college costs have combined to drive all but two of the nation’s 18 such funds, known as prepaid college savings plans, into the red, jeopardizing those pledges...

...Only 22 percent of schools have written policies on on-campus betting, and fewer still offer recovery programs specific to this particular compulsion, according to data collected by the Cambridge Health Alliance, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School. That the problem is serious is underscored by other studies suggesting that nearly half of America’s college students place wagers at least once a year, and that as many as 11 percent could be addicts...

...Dozens of colleges — including Amherst, Bates, Carleton, Colby, Vassar, Wellesley and Yale — are embracing student blogs on their Web sites, seeing them as a powerful marketing tool for high school students, who these days are less interested in official messages and statistics than in first-hand narratives and direct interaction with current students. But so far, none of the blogs match the interactivity and creativity of those of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they are posted prominently on the admissions homepage, along with hundreds of responses from prospective applicants — all unedited...

...The online education sector grew 13% last year and had been growing at about 20% in previous years. Nearly one in four students take at least some college courses online, up from one in 10 in 2002...President Barack Obama pledged $500 million for online courses and materials as part of a multi-pronged plan aimed at expanding access to college...

The University of Minnesota Regents meet later this week to act on the university's 2010 state capitol budget request. The request asks the Legislature to approve $194.7 million in state bonds to be matched by $47.3 million in university bonds...

...Although the situation has been grimmest in California, higher education across the United States is in a period of retrenchment. That decline has been greeted with dismay by many higher-education experts, who say the United States can ill afford to scale back investment in colleges when Singapore and many of its Asian neighbors are plowing money into higher education and research...

Across East Asia, governments are funneling resources into elite universities, financing basic research, and expanding access to vocational and junior colleges, all with the goal of driving economic development...

...While community colleges don't have the graduate and research programs one would find at a university, they have tried to be all things to all people...At least that's the way it's been at many institutions -- and given the word "community" in their names, the philosophy has been a point of pride. But at Delta, that's not something that can be sustained, officials say...

...At several points in the call, administration officials let the two-year college presidents know that priorities they favor are dependent on Congress passing the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (and the community college focused American Graduation Initiative that is part of it) this fall...