2024-09-26
- Researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology demonstrated that emotion enhances memory for contextual details, challenging the view that emotion impairs the ability to remember such information.
The report was led by Paul...
LAS News Archive
2024-09-26 - In a new study, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign tackled a thorny problem: How do nutritional stress, viral infections, and exposure to pesticides together influence honey bee survival? By looking at all three stressors together, the scientists found that good nutrition...
2024-09-24 - The Big Ten Academic Alliance has pledged $30,000 in grants to a proposal from the University of Illinois and the University of Minnesota to build transgender studies across the Big Ten campuses. Now, faculty members in the Department of Gender & Women’s...
2024-09-20 - Kameno Bell knows that fumbling is inevitable — in football, and in life. Bell (BS, ’92, biology; MD, ’01), a former fullback for the Fighting Illini, has excelled in the classroom and on the gridiron, playing two seasons of professional football for the...
2024-09-20 - How are schools of thought defined? The College of Liberal Arts & Sciences has more than 60 academic units, and some, like English and chemistry, have been within LAS since the beginning. But how is it that the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular...
2024-09-20 - For evolution, ecology and behavior professor Alison Bell, asking big questions seems to be a lifelong habit. As an undergraduate studying the history and philosophy of science at the University of...
2024-09-20 - Professor of classics Clara Bosak-Schroeder’s first book, “Other Natures: Environmental Encounters With Ancient Greek Ethnography,” (UC Press 2020), explored how ancient Greek authors cast humans and nonhumans in complex, inter-dependent relationships....
2024-09-20 - Before social media, before podcasts, before streaming television — it was 1993, and Eboo Patel was a freshman hoping to find his way while living on West Gregory Drive in Allen Hall. And that made all the difference. The eclectic, diverse residence hall community became a rich environment where...
2024-09-20 - Jane Desmond remembers the day she and several colleagues drove to the great ape center in Des Moines to visit Kanzi, a bonobo who is one of the first non-human primates to show an understanding of human language. The center’s researcher asked Kanzi if his visitors could take...
2024-09-20 - Ricardo Diaz still remembers the night chemistry professor Joaquin Rodriguez-Lopez walked into a room full of kids and told them to throw ketchup on a volunteer wearing a special shirt. Soon the room was enveloped in ketchup, laughter,...
2024-09-19 - Thanks to a serendipitous discovery and a lot of painstaking work, scientists can now build biohybrid molecules that combine the homing powers of DNA with the broad functional repertoire of proteins — without having to synthesize them one by one, researchers report in a new study. Using a naturally...
2024-09-16 - University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign students Gabrielle Capone, Leland Pan, and Frankie Ward are recipients of the Voyager Scholarship, the Obama-Chesky Scholarship for Public Service. Capone, who is majoring in geography and geographic information science...
2024-09-16 - Taking inspiration from enzymes, chemists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed a catalyst to simplify the synthesis of ethers, key functional components of many drugs, foods, personal care items, and other consumer goods. The catalyst puts the two chemical ingredients in just...
2024-09-12 - The word “atlas,” may conjure images of giant books chock full of maps and a dizzying array of facts and figures. However, the new book “...
2024-09-12 - According to two psychologists, the field of psychological science has a problem with the concept of self-control. It has named self-control both a “trait” — a key facet of personality involving attributes like conscientiousness, grit and the ability to tolerate delayed gratification — and a “state...
2024-09-11 - A new book co-written by a political scientist explores the road to the White House through three distinct eras of presidential campaigning. The book, “Battleground: Electoral College...
2024-09-11 - The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has welcomed a record-breaking class for the fall 2024 semester. With a freshman enrollment of 9,008, the new class brings record total student enrollment at 59,238, including on-campus and online students. This total includes 37,140 undergraduates and...
2024-09-06 - John J. Bird was one of the most prominent and influential Black men in the state of Illinois in the latter part of the 19th century, and he was the first Black board member for an essentially all-white university in Illinois – and likely in the U.S. – when he was appointed in 1873 to the board of...
2024-09-05 - Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for researchers, but with a significant limitation: The inability to explain how it came to its decisions, a problem known as the “AI black box.” By combining AI with automated chemical synthesis and experimental validation, an interdisciplinary team of...
2024-09-05 - I can barely hear Esther Ngumbi over the roar of greenhouse fans as she shows me around her rooftop laboratory in Morrill Hall. The benches are full of tomato plants, and the tomatoes don’t look good. Half of the plants are submerged in bins of water. Their leaves are yellow and withering. Some of...
2024-09-04 - The tumultuous 2024 U.S. presidential election season is fraught with partisan battles over contentious issues such as abortion, immigration, racial violence and climate change. In a national political culture so heated and discordant that expressing differing views is often met with attacks...
2024-09-04 - A newly funded U.S. National Science Foundation iBioFoundry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will build on more than a decade of research at the U of I to integrate synthetic biology, laboratory automation, and artificial intelligence to advance protein and cellular engineering. This...
2024-08-30 - Launched in 2021, the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) extends our view into space more than ever before. Astronomy professor Yue Shen is principal investigator on a recently selected...
2024-08-29 - Using evolution as a guiding principle, researchers have successfully engineered bacteria-yeast hybrids to perform photosynthetic carbon assimilation, generate cellular energy, and support yeast growth without traditional carbon feedstocks like glucose or glycerol. By engineering photosynthetic...
2024-08-29 - About five years ago, graduate students at the University of Illinois embarked on a project for their ASTRO 596 class. That project has since evolved into a sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning software that can identify objects from telescope images, such as stars and...