2006-04-01
- Coming to the land of milk and honey can be hazardous to new immigrants' diet and health.So says Ilana Redstone Akresh, a visiting professor of sociology at the University of Illinois who recently analyzed dietary assimilation and immigrant health. In her study, Akresh considered the changes in immigrants' diets after coming to the United States and the...
2006-04-01 - Recent evidence from the Cassini Mission's Huygens Probe suggests that the largest moon orbiting Saturn, Titan, features methane rivers that sculpt channels into that moon's continents of ice. Surface images from the probe show gravel-sized pieces of river ice similar to stones found in Earth's dry riverbeds.But with a surface temperature of minus 179 degrees Celsius and an atmospheric pressure...
2006-03-01 - From paying her own way through college to writing a landmark book addressing Asian American culture, Betty Lee Sung has a habit of taking matters into her own hands. After discovering how little material was available on the Chinese community in America, Sung wrote Mountain of Gold: The Story of the Chinese in America in 1967, which sparked interest in Asian American studies...
2006-03-01 - Dianne Pinderhughes, University of Illinois political science professor, was recently nominated to serve as president of the American Political Science Association (APSA) for the 2007-2008 term. If elected, she will also act as president-elect for the 2006-2007 term. Elections will be held during the annual meeting on Labor Day weekend in Philadelphia.Pinderhughes, a professor in the Department...
2006-02-01 - The decision whether to go with hormone-replacement therapy is complicated and confusing, says Ann Nardulli, professor of molecular and integrative physiology. However, her research has shed new light on how estrogen acts in the body-in the hopes of making these decisions a little clearer. Estrogen, which is critical to a woman's...
2006-02-01 - A fit body can increase the chances of a fit mind for women using hormone-replacement therapy to battle the symptoms of menopause. University of Illinois researchers have found that being physically fit can slow the decline in cognitive brain functions associated with the long-term use (11 years or more) of hormone-replacement therapy. What's more, exercise can even improve the...
2006-02-01 - The hormone estrogen, vital to a woman's reproductive development, has been linked for several years to an increased risk of breast cancer. Now, LAS researchers have uncovered a piece of the puzzle that could help to explain why.After exposing breast cancer cells to estrogen in the laboratory, Benita S. Katzenellenbogen, professor of physiology and cell biology in the...
2006-02-01 - Someday, you might just wallpaper your living room with a flat, plastic video display, rather than flower patterns. Or soldiers might cover their tents with an "electronic tarp" that monitors the air for biological and chemical weapons.Traditional electronic devices are solid and rigid, such as the circuits within a desktop computer or an iPod. But University of Illinois researchers are...
2006-02-01 - They are calling him "the King of Bling" because of his lavish array of gold and jewels. And as he begins his second tour of the United States, he's getting the rock-star treatment. But unlike most aging rock stars, he just happens to be over 3,000 years old. His name: King Tut. Tutankhamun, the boy king of Egypt, last swept through the United States in 1976-77 in one of the country's first...
2006-02-01 - Often in the classrooms, daycare centers, and libraries that Rigoberto Gonzalez visits around the country, the LAS associate professor of English will see in a child's young face his own unlikely journey. After all, the middle-class life Gonzalez now inhabits in literature and academia is only one brief generation removed from the southern California...
2006-02-01 - Could vital information about many human diseases be deciphered from genes inside freshwater flatworms?Researchers cannot yet offer a definitive answer, but a recent study at the U. of I. has provided an important advance for pursuing both that idea and the biology of stem cells. After sequencing and analyzing genes from the planarian Schmidtea mediterranea, researchers discovered that not only...
2006-02-01 - September 26, 2005I feel moved to respond to the American Counseling Association's request for therapists to travel to New Orleans to counsel storm victims. Besides having practiced psychology for 25 years, I am a flood victim myself. While vacationing in 1989, a broken pipe sent 173,000 gallons of water coursing through my home, reducing my residence, therapy offices, and all of my possessions...
2006-01-01 - The young and highly experimental literary magazine produced at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has won a prestigious literary award. Ninth Letter, published by the English department in collaboration with the School of Art and Design, has...
2006-01-01 - LAS student Ashley Mazzola recalls the bewildered look of the young Venezuelan boy whom she was helping with a craft project when she told him she was born in Illinois. "But how do you speak Spanish?" he asked.His assumption that only those from Spanish-language countries speak Spanish made her laugh, she says, but his underlying observation that Americans are provincial also reinforced her...
2006-01-01 - Oxygen may be necessary for life, but it sure gets in the way of making hydrogen fuel cheaply and abundantly from a family of enzymes present in many microorganisms. Blocking oxygen's path to an enzyme's production machinery could lead to a renewable energy source that would generate only water as its waste product.Researchers at the University of Illinois have opened a window by way of computer...
2006-01-01 - Does dark energy exist? Or is Albert Einstein's most famous theory flawed?These are two of the million-dollar questions that an international team of astronomers hopes to answer as they gaze back to the beginning of the universe in search of a mysterious property known as "dark energy."The preliminary stage of this two-part, landmark effort recently began when LAS...-
2006-01-01 - On January 19, Sarah C. Mangelsdorf was able to drop "acting" from her title as she officially took the reigns as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."As interim dean, Sarah Mangelsdorf has administered the college with considerable wisdom, all the while bringing along the college strategic plan and contributing notably to the broad...
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...
2005-12-01 - With the benefit of computer imaging and macro-photography, a scholar who has spent two years studying six fragmented clay tablets from the ancient Canaanite civilization is proposing some new interpretations of the tablets. Wayne Pitard, an LAS professor in the Department of Religion and expert on ancient Near Eastern texts, has devoted his scholarly...
2005-12-01 - Using bark from the South American Quillaja saponaria Molina tree, chemists in LAS have synthesized a molecule that boosts the body's ability to fight disease.In clinical trials, the molecule called QS-21A has been shown to significantly improve the body's immune response in vaccine therapies against aggressive diseases such as melanoma, breast cancer, small-cell lung cancer, prostate cancer, HIV...
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....-
2005-10-01 - 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...