2005-12-01
- Measurements of the ion-current through the open state of a membrane-protein's ion channel have allowed scientists at the University of Illinois to obtain a detailed picture of the effect of the protein microenvironment on the affinity of ionizable amino-acid residues for protons.The findings are expected to be welcome news for chemists and biophysicists, both experimentalists and theoreticians,...
2005-12-01 - Leave it to the humble sea slug to help scientists unravel the mysteries of the human brain. University of Illinois researchers have developed innovative tools that can probe the chemistry of the brain, a single neuron at a time. And one rich application has been with the sea slug Aplysia californica.The sea slug's simple brain, which contains only 10,000 neurons, serves as an...
2005-12-01 - Humor is a morale booster in a war zone. And so, it seems, is school spirit. College rivalries are proving to be a welcome distraction and the reason that some battalion offices in Iraq look like tailgate tents during football season. A rainbow of college logos and mascots are emblazoned on everything from director's chairs to boxer shorts as soldiers vie for the title of most spirited alum....
2005-12-01 - Using a technique employed by astronomers to determine stellar surface temperatures, chemists in LAS have measured the temperature inside a single, acoustically driven collapsing bubble. Their results seem out of this world. "When bubbles in a liquid get compressed, the insides get hot-very hot," says Ken Suslick, the Marvin T. Schmidt Professor of ...
2005-12-01 - Many insects enter the United States accidentally, as hitchhikers on various plants imported in commerce, but how many really stay? Conventional thinking says the answer is in the numbers of both insects and times they enter, but new findings to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggest that opportunity alone is no guarantee of a successful invasion. Of...
2005-10-01 - Several contributors to Ninth Letter, the literary and design journal published by U. of I., were accorded accolades in the 2005 edition of The Best of American Short Stories. The prestigious anthology, which has been published annually since 1915, is the flagship publication for Houghton Mifflin's Best American series. Selected as one of 20 best stories of 2004 was "A Taste of...
2005-10-01 - The recent selection of chemist Todd Martinez as a 2005 MacArthur Foundation Fellow was a reminder of how truly outstanding the faculty are in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Nearly half have been nationally recognized for their accomplishments through induction into national academies and with national and international honors. Faculty are members of the American Academy of Arts and...
2005-10-01 - In the 2003 science fiction flick The Core, a team of scientists drills to the center of the Earth in an attempt to restart the Earth's core, which has mysteriously stopped spinning, altering the planet's magnetic field and setting off catastrophic-if unrealistic-results. Disoriented birds crash into buildings, pacemakers fail to keep pace, and the orbiting Space Shuttle's navigation...
2005-10-01 - Whatever bad rap the Middle Ages earned from the Crusades, torture chambers, and plagues, the times were more enlightened than today when it came to riddles. During the Middle, or medieval, Ages—those thousand years of lords and ladies from around 500 to 1500 A.D.—riddles were elevated to the level of art and prized as sources of entertainment and education. Unlike today's transparent word...-
2005-10-01 - Even the most advanced current technologies have a slice of the distant past buried deep within them.The proliferation of Internet news, while a twentieth century invention, may have its roots in yesteryear. The various news sources available to today's consumer harkens back to a time when news purveyors did not adhere to a single journalistic philosophy, says Scott Althaus, LAS professor of...
2005-10-01 - Earlier in September, five men found themselves having an interesting sort of alumni meeting. They are all United States Marines, swapping stories about games at Memorial Stadium, classes at Altgeld, and, of course, drinking at Joe's. They were, however, not rehashing old times over a football game or at the monthly alumni meeting; they are all deployed together in Iraq. First Lieutenants Carlos...
2005-10-01 - Todd Martinez showed up at his University of Illinois office expecting to participate in an ordinary conference call. But the conference call turned out to be a ruse. It was just a way to get him into his office for a phone call informing him that he was one of 25 recipients of the prestigious "genius grants" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Martinez, a professor of...-
2005-10-01 - The reason your teenager's legs have suddenly outgrown his bed while his appetite has outgrown your refrigerator's capacity is not as clear-cut as you might think. In fact, anthropologists have as many theories regarding adolescent growth spurts as teens have excuses for not cleaning their rooms.Humans, apparently, are the only species that go through the dreaded teen growth spurt. We take twice...
2005-10-01 - How do you extend a warm welcome to 4,200 freshmen? In the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences it was by providing them the opportunity to meet and learn more about each other. On August 22, an estimated 90 percent of the Class of 2009 streamed into the U. of I. Armory for the college's first-ever Freshman Welcome. For an hour-and-a-half, the students engaged in fun team-...
2005-10-01 - Susan Avery (MS, '74, physics; PhD, '78, atmospheric sciences) still remembers the weather contests in the 1970s in which University of Illinois atmospheric science students competed to see who could forecast a particular city's weather most accurately for an entire semester. At that time, however, it was unlikely that Avery would have been able to forecast her future as director of one of the...
2005-10-01 - Robert Stuart (BS, '43, chemical engineering) heard the bombs coming. Instantly, he rolled out of his army bunk just seconds before an explosion ripped the roof off of his bamboo barracks. Stuart vividly remembers this experience from his service time in the Philippines, where his company arrived shortly after General Douglas MacArthur. Stuart came out of the attack unscathed, but his wartime...
2005-10-01 - Turkey and Iran had been trying to connect their capitals by railroad since 1936, but the task was continually interrupted by war and other strife. As a result, the 1,500-mile railroad was still 350 miles short of being connected, even in the late 1950s. That's when Secretary of State John Dulles gave John McDonald (AB, '43, political science; JD, '46, law) the task of overseeing the completion...- 2005-10-01 - Growing up in Egypt, Mohamed El-Ashry (MS, '63, PhD, '66, geology) cultivated a passion for geology following dramatic discoveries of oil in the Gulf of Suez and along the Red Sea. But it wasn't until he came to the University of Illinois in the early 1960s that El-Ashry discovered that his interest in geology goes far beyond what happens below the surface. What happens on top of the land became...
2005-10-01 - When some people retire, they head to golf courses and warmer climates. But when George W. Parshall (PhD, '54, organic chemistry) retired from DuPont in 1992, he took a slightly different course. He joined the effort to destroy chemical weapon stockpiles in the United States and across the world. Parshall, who received a PhD in organic chemistry from the College of Liberal Arts &...
2005-09-01 - Every year come August, Champaign-Urbana experiences a population explosion when University of Illinois students return for the fall semester. Add a record number of freshmen to that mix, and the campus was hopping as classes started. Roughly 7,600 freshmen enrolled in the University this fall, the most for any individual class in Illinois history. That shattered the record set by the Class of...
2005-09-01 - Exercise invigorates and enlivens all the facilities of body and of mind... It spreads a gladness and satisfaction over our minds and qualifies us for every sort of business, and every sort of pleasure. John Adams Although John Adams lacked the research capabilities of today's modern scientist, we now know that his anecdotal evidence was indeed correct. Art Kramer, LAS...-
2005-09-01 - Four professors from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences were among the seven U. of I. professors recently appointed to the Center for Advanced Studies (CAS). The professors from LAS are Peter Beak, chemistry; Stephen Jaeger, Germanic languages and literatures, and...
2005-06-01 - In Room 140 of U. of I.'s Admissions and Records building there sits a filing cabinet that serves as a glorified lost and found. It contains manila envelopes stuffed with standard-sized pieces of paper that are infused with meaning, but have been forgotten over the course of time. The several hundred unclaimed diplomas in Fred Christensen's office gather dust, day after day. The oldest dates...
2005-06-01 - Don't try to hoodwink that baby. In contrast to conventional wisdom, infants grasp sophisticated psychological reasoning at a much earlier age than previously believed. LAS psychology professor Renée Baillargeon studied several dozen 15-month-olds and found that they could distinguish between certain true and false beliefs. Past studies,...
2005-06-01 - Last year in the Midwest, the dog days of summer more resembled the first days of autumn. Newspapers throughout Illinois reported on the record cool summer. On August 12, 2004, for example, Chicago had a high of 58; the day before it was 62. Record lows in the 40s were reported throughout the state that week. Two weeks later, hardwoods in the Chicago suburbs began to display their autumn colors....