2016-07-26
- If someone had asked the great artist Loredo Taft, creator of the Alma Mater, what people would call his iconic statue in the year 2016, it's safe to say that the words Pokegym never would have crossed his lips.Even a month ago, few people could have foreseen how the Pokemon Go craze has hit campus, with Alma, the Eternal Flame, and scores of other campus landmarks being drawn into the augmented...
2016-07-15 - Professor Adrian Burgos Jr. has been named interim director of the American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Burgos' appointment is effective Aug. 16, 2016.“Our American Indian Studies Program has endured a difficult few years. It remains an important part of LAS and our campus community, and it plays a critical...
2016-07-08 - Editor’s note: Scenes from oil-rich Venezuela show a country descending into chaos: desperate people looting stores and food trucks, political unrest, rising crime and hyperinflation. Damarys Canache, professor of political science at Illinois, is a native of Venezuela who studies the country’s politics and has conducted public opinion research there. She spoke with News...
2016-07-07 - Brendan Harley, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has been selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s 22nd annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering (USFOE) symposium.The academy invites engineers ages 30 to 45 who are performing exceptional engineering research and technical work in a variety of disciplines to...
2016-07-06 - Ashley Young has spent the better part of every school year since 2012 preparing a group of fellow college students for the ride of a lifetime. The students, all members of a group called Illini 4000, bike from New York City to San Diego every summer, raising money for cancer research along the way. Young, a senior in...
2016-07-05 - In an era of so many scientific and technological breakthroughs—advances in genome editing, the discovery of Higgs boson or the “God particle,” the launching of deep space satellites—two award-winning University of Illinois scientists have teamed up to re-introduce people to a remarkable 19th century lecture series about the candle. Yes, the deceptively simple candle. “There is no...
2016-07-05 - Until now, simulations of black hole collisions (and the matter that swirls around them) have been built upon simplified approximations. For the first time, however, researchers at Illinois and elsewhere created 3-D simulations of the collision of two supermassive black holes using Einstein's general theory of relativity.Stuart Shapiro, professor of physics and astronomy at Illinois, presented...
2016-07-01 - Mary-Dell Chilton arrived on the University of Illinois campus in 1956 as a celebrated young scientist—she had just been named a finalist in America’s top high school science competition, the Intel Science Talent Search. A chemistry major, Chilton didn’t take a particular interest in molecular biology at first, nor did she know that Illinois faculty members were at the forefront of this emerging...
2016-06-30 - In less than the blink of an eye, Einstein's theory of relativity is on its way to becoming scientific fact. Scientists have observed gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime—for the second time, and researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and departments of astronomy and physics at U of I were part of the collaboration identifying the event.Scientists...
2016-06-29 - A new study has clarified how brain structure and chemistry give rise to specific aspects of “fluid intelligence,” the ability to adapt to new situations and solve problems one has never encountered before. The study, reported in the journal NeuroImage, links higher concentrations of a compound indicating energy production—a “marker”—in the brain with an improved ability to solve...
2016-06-27 - Students attending the U of I’s Summer Institute for Languages of the Muslim World’s introductory course in Arabic say that’s it’s been full of pleasant surprises, not the least of which is how tired they are at the end of an intensive day.These high school students, who have limited or no prior knowledge of Arabic, are enrolled in June to study Modern Standard Arabic. Upon completion they’ll...
2016-06-20 - It’s called the latitudinal diversity gradient, a phenomenon seen today in most plant and animal species around the world: Biodiversity decreases from the equator to higher latitudes. But a new study of fossils representing 63 million of the past 65 million years reveals that—for North American mammals, at least—the modern LDG is the exception rather than the rule.The findings, reported in the...
2016-06-15 - Millions will be vacationing this summer at national parks and hundreds of other sites managed by the National Park Service, which turns 100 this August. Robert Pahre, a political science professor at Illinois, has written extensively about the often-complex issues surrounding the parks, focusing especially on Yellowstone, where he each summer...
2016-06-10 - The U.S. Department of Defense released its Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program awards last month, and three faculty members from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences are part of the newly funded research efforts. The annual MURI program encourages cutting edge research on college campuses by funding select studies through an application process. Two of the honored...
2016-06-10 - Bradley Hartmann grew up around lumber yards and construction sites. Now founder and “El Presidente” of Red Angle, Inc., he’s still in the construction business—and putting his degree to use helping builders and suppliers adapt to an industry that communicates increasingly in Spanish. Occupation: Founder and El Presidente of Red Angle, Inc....
2016-06-09 - Editor’s note: Rising income inequality has been brought front and center as an issue in this year’s presidential campaign. But do we really know what’s driving it, and the keys to closing the gap? Are popular explanations supported by research and data? Sociologist Kevin Leicht has focused much of his career on inequality and related issues, and suggests a rethink in...
2016-06-06 - Leon Cooper is accustomed to facilitating reunions, but his most treasured ones typically don’t have so many people. The Chicago White Sox and a crowd of more than 28,000 home fans honored Cooper, 96, for his military service and his work advocating for the safe return of World War II soldiers’ bodies that remain scattered on Pacific islands more than 70 years after the war...
2016-06-01 - It is early May in central Belize, nearing the end of the dry season. While farmers anxiously await the beginning of the rainy season vital for crops, archaeologists hope it starts as late as possible. Tropical storms transform the landscape, making it difficult to get around, even in four-wheel-drive vehicles. Also, excavating in the clayey mud is not fun.We did not start this season excavating...
2016-05-26 - A new study reveals that police recruits and experienced officers are more likely than others to subscribe to colorblind racial beliefs—the notion that they (and people in general) see no differences among people from different racial groups and treat everyone the same.The findings appear in the journal Race and Social Problems.The study, conducted by a range of researchers in...
2016-05-24 - The U.S. has been a leading voice for human rights. It’s also run prison camps, now and in the past, that denied people those rights. A. Naomi Paik wanted to explore that contradiction—finding out why these camps were organized, how they were justified, how prisoners have been treated and their response to that treatment. The result is her book “Rightlessness: Testimony and...
2016-05-19 - Occupants of Noyes Laboratory can expect plenty of construction on the third floor during the next 18 months—more noise at Noyes—but the result will be a more productive research environment for dozens of chemists.Construction for the Center for Theoretical Chemistry, a new state-of-the-art hub for theoretical chemists at Illinois, will begin in June. The 10,600-square-foot center will be built...
2016-05-16 - Mental health experts are familiar with associations between clinically depressed parents and their teenagers’ risk taking, but a new study at Illinois has for the first time concluded that parental depression contributes to greater brain activity in areas linked to risk taking in adolescent children. “This is the first empirical evidence to show that parental depression...
2016-05-16 - At the age of seven, Aadeel Akhtar met a little girl during a trip to his home country of Pakistan. They were similar in age and background, but Akhtar noticed something that made them worlds apart. The little girl was missing her right leg. Rather than the support of a prosthetic limb to make her whole again, she was forced to rely on a tree branch as a crutch. In that moment...
2016-05-16 - University of Illinois history professor Harry Liebersohn has been chosen to receive the prestigious Humboldt Research Award honoring a career of research achievements.The Humboldt award is presented by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn, Germany, honoring up to 100 researchers annually. Recipients are “academics whose fundamental...
2016-05-13 - Imagine—instead of acres of oil wells on barren land—endless fields of towering green sugarcane, with each stalk producing renewable and sustainable biofuel. The University of Illinois and the University of Florida have been awarded a third round of funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to realize ultra-productive biofuel...