2011-04-01
- In Jules Verne’s 19th-century science-fiction classic, Journey to the Center of the Earth, explorers climb down volcanic tubes to reach the center of our planet. Along the way, they discover gigantic mushrooms and insects, a vast interior sea, and battling dinosaurs. Today, geophysicists do not spend much time worrying about dinosaurs as they study the inner earth, but they do face an...
2011-03-01 - Each year the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences recognizes a handful of staff members and academic professionals for their outstanding contributions to the college and service to others. These individuals, who were nominated by members of the campus community, demonstrate excellence and enhance the image of the college. LAS Academic Professional Award ...
2011-03-01 - Christina Cheng stands on one of the coldest spots on Earth as she watches a large cylindrical trap being lowered through a hole in 20-foot-thick ice. She’s inside a heated fish hut in Antarctica, but far below her feet is the coldest water on the planet, with a nearly constant temperature of -1.9° C, or 28° F. Cheng, an LAS professor of animal biology...
2011-03-01 - If you’ve sat through sex ed class in high school, you’ve heard it all before: A pregnancy begins when a fertilized egg implants in the lining of the uterus. But University of Illinois researchers have now figured out a key mechanism in this process—a finding that could help explain some forms of female infertility and has implications in understanding diseases such as endometrial cancer.At the...
2011-03-01 - A University of Illinois mathematician has been elected a 2011 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Donald Burkholder, an emeritus professor of mathematics, was among 503 new fellows honored by their peers at the AAAS annual meeting in February. Burkholder was cited for “distinguished contributions to probability theory,...
2011-03-01 - Every generation, it seems that someone in the older population looks around at the new crop of students and announces that we are in the midst of a writing crisis. But Gail Hawisher, director of the University of Illinois Center for Writing Studies, takes issue with this common notion. “More people in the world are writing today than at any other time...
2011-03-01 - Researchers have determined the structure and mechanism of an enzyme that performs the crucial first step in the formation of cholesterol and a key virulence factor in staph bacteria.Chemists at the University of Illinois and collaborators in Taiwan studied a type of enzyme found in humans, plants, fungi, parasites, and many bacteria that begins...
2011-03-01 - When a massive earthquake shook Haiti to its core in January of 2010, it didn’t just unleash deadly geologic forces. The quake also unleashed the first cholera outbreak in decades, due to contaminated water in the wake of disaster. Aid has poured into Haiti, but one of the most unique forms of assistance involves animation and cell phones, and it comes from the University of Illinois. A U of I...
2011-02-01 - Hundreds of new and returning representatives arrived on Capitol Hill probably thinking they know their districts well.But the picture in their heads of the constituents they represent is in fact “limited and flawed,” thanks to unconscious mental shortcuts that determine who they see and don’t see, says Kristina Miler (pronounced Miller), a University of Illinois...
2011-02-01 - Fans of the Lincoln bust in Lincoln Hall won’t have to wait until the building reopens in 2012 to rub its nose for luck. Beginning on February 20, the restored bust will greet visitors to U of I’s Spurlock Museum. The display will afford visitors a rare 360-degree view of the bust and will also offer the chance to restart an old tradition. “What it...
2011-02-01 - Who would have thought that your ability to obliterate a fortress in outer space could tell you something about your ability to learn? But it did just that in a recent University of Illinois study. Arthur Kramer, an LAS psychology professor and director of the Beckman Institute, led a team that developed a new system for analyzing brain activity...
2011-02-01 - There have been only a few times in the last two weeks, as Egypt has erupted in protest, that Mohammad Khalil, a professor of religion at U of I, feared for his mother’s safety. The first time was when she drove into Cairo to retrieve medicine from her mother’s apartment near Tahrir Square, the site of unrest since January 25. The other time was when the government cut off all Internet access,...
2011-02-01 - Fear stimulates my imagination.—Advertising Executive Don Draper, Mad MenIn the battle over air freshener sales, it’s a matter of scents and cents. When the popular odor eliminator, Febreze, hit the marketplace in the late 1990s, there was one basic fragrance, says David Whipple, an LAS alum with the parent company, consumer behemoth Procter & Gamble. Today, there are more than a...
2011-02-01 - A nonprofit publishing enterprise once described by its founder as “a hopelessly quixotic venture” has been named recipient of the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.John O’Brien, the founder of the Dalkey Archive Press, based at the University of Illinois, learned of the award recently by email from Critics Circle president Jane Ciabattari. The notice arrived...
2011-01-01 - The Quad is regarded as a timeless link between generations of Illinois alumni, but had the late campus cop Peter “Adam” Adams, who officially retired in 1933, appeared today, a lot of sunbathers, Frisbee fans, and free-ranging bicyclists might have an unpleasant lesson in how much the space has changed.There was a time when nobody was allowed to brandish a cigarette on the Quad, much less dwell...
2011-01-01 - The Spurlock Museum at the University of Illinois has made a major addition to its collections with a gift of more than 1,000 artifacts from Africa, Asia, and Central America.The artifacts in the new Kieffer-Lopez Collection include a number of textiles and ethnographic pieces, according to Amy Heggemeyer, assistant registrar for acquisitions. Eight pieces from the collection, including clothing...
2011-01-01 - When it comes to climate change it seems that everyone has an opinion. Few receive a platform as prominent as the New York Times, however, as did University of Illinois sophomore Emily Cross in December after attending climate treaty negotiations in Mexico. Her opportunity came after a professor suggested that Cross, a major in Earth systems,...
2011-01-01 - E-books date all of the way back to the 16th century. Only in this case, the “e” is for “emblem.” Emblem books were every bit the rage that today’s e-books have become. They are a unique combination of pictures and words, and they were popular for over 200 years—from 1531 to about 1750. Electronic books are a blink of an eye in comparison.But yesterday’s emblem books are fast becoming today’s...
2011-01-01 - Researchers at the University of Illinois who have studied the lives of more than 1,000 children from birth to 18 years old have found that those who spend in excess of 30 hours per week in nonrelative care through the age of 4½ might become more physically aggressive than peers who spend less time in early child care.Educational psychology professor Philip Rodkin and...
2011-01-01 - It’s been called the day Chicago “forgot her conscience,” and it all started with the hurling of a rock. It was July 27, 1919, a time when Chicago beaches were segregated. But when an African American youth “strayed across the imaginary line dividing the ‘Negro’ and ‘white’ waters of Lake Michigan,” the boy was struck by a rock thrown by a white man and drowned, says LAS alum Arvarh Strickland in...
2010-12-01 - Congratulations to the 29 anthropology students at University of Illinois who were announced as winners in this year’s Public Anthropology Award program. The students in Professor Aide Acosta’s Anthropology 103 class, “Anthropology in a Changing World,” were recognized for essays they submitted on the topic of who should benefit from anthropological...
2010-12-01 - Good news for control freaks! New research confirms that having some authority over how one takes in new information significantly enhances one’s ability to remember it.“Having active control over a learning situation is very powerful and we're beginning to understand why,” said U of I psychology professor Neal Cohen, who led the study with...
2010-12-01 - They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So is savagery, according to recent research at the University of Illinois. Historically, indigenous peoples have been depicted as everything from peace-loving islanders to murderous brutes, depending on their relationship with colonial powers. Robert Tierney, a professor of East Asian languages and cultures...
2010-12-01 - For the second time in three years, a graduate of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has received a prestigious Marshall Scholarship for graduate study in the United Kingdom. With the scholarship, Josephine (Josie) Chambers, of Champaign, plans to pursue master’s degrees in integrated resource management at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and in conservation leadership at the...
2010-12-01 - Researchers have found an association between physical fitness and the brain in 9- and 10-year-old children: Those who are more fit tend to have a bigger hippocampus and perform better on a test of memory than their less-fit peers.“This is the first study I know of that has used MRI measures to look at differences in the brain between kids who are fit and kids who aren’t fit,” says University of...