2004-07-01
- Refocusing the attention of errant students was only one of Robert Copeland's roles during his 27 years as advisor and, eventually, as dean in LAS's Student Academic Affairs Office. When he died this past June, students also said good-bye to a father figure, a therapist, and a friend who kept their needs front and center. Copeland grew up in tiny Hendersonville, North Carolina, where his...
2004-07-01 - Your parents did it. Even your great-great grandparents did it. The urge to dig at your teeth to dislodge a wedged slivver of food is, researchers say, older than written history. LAS anthropologist Dr Leslea Hlusko claims that ancient man used rudimentary toothpicks, made from grass stalks 1.8 million years ago. Hlusko argues that toothpicking is probably...
2004-07-01 - For those who think that life changes much too quickly, consider the intrepid cicada. In fact, at this time of year it would be hard to ignore it. This 100 percent green-blooded American insect has survived glaciers, predators, farms, and subdivisions. The periodic appearance of the cicada is a resourceful piece of the American experience, writ very slow, 17 years to be exact. Currently, the...-
2004-04-01 - Academic Advising Award Kathryn A. Martensen LAS General Curriculum Center Kathryn Martensen alleviates incoming freshmen's fears by offering a welcoming smile, excellent advice, and genuine concern for their academic career. . She helps make this large university feel welcoming and accessible to freshmen. Because General Curriculum advisors do not work with a student though their entire college...
2004-03-01 - April 1-2, 2004 Illini Union Leaders shape history by transforming followers into leaders. This controversial claim by Pulitzer Prize-winning political scientist James MacGregor Burns will be the subject of debate this April when Burns visits U of I as this year's Cline Symposium keynote speaker. His talk will kick off two days of lively discussion on the democratic challenges and...
2004-03-01 - A white dress, gold bands, lace veil, and white frosted cake are all elements you might see at an American wedding, but this "standard" is not an American tradition. One hundred and sixty years ago, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert wearing a white satin gown, abandoning the velvet robes of her ancestors. Elizabeth Pleck, an LAS professor of history...
2004-03-01 - J. Fred Giertz keeps an eye on the ups and downs in the Illinois economy, and you can, too. Since 1981, this economist in LAS and the staff at U of I's Institute of Government and Public Affairs have generated monthly economic indices, which they now regularly posts to the Web. By logging in, you, too, can get the latest snapshot of the state of the economy or view its historical swings...
2004-03-01 - A pioneering interdisciplinary research initiative that will combine neuroscience, chemistry, and materials science in an effort to find new treatments for brain diseases and damage is being launched in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences with a $1.2 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation.The grant supports a project called Neural Repair in the Microcircuit Domain, which is part of a...
2004-03-01 - Just like humans, certain flies need to be "in the mood" before they mate. And nothing creates a better mood for apple flies than the scent of a nice apple tree, while hawthorn flies prefer an essence of hawthorn in the air before finding a mate. These mating preferences are strange because technically, both flies are the same species; they are known by different names depending on which tree...-
2004-03-01 - Plenty of students at University of Illinois have legacies, but this LAS graduate's family history extends to before the campus was built. "I like to tell people I'm a sixth generation Illini," says Angela Schriver (BS '03, psychology) with pride. In 1864, her great-great-great-grandfather Graham Lee was the vice president of the State Board of Agriculture, the organization that helped establish...
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2004-03-01 - Picture this lunch scene: 40 college seniors are sitting with their shoulders straight, napkins neatly draped across their laps, slurplessly sipping their soup. It's only the first course out of four they will consume over the next two hours as they get tips on everything from proper utensil usage (work from the outside in) to whether to indulge in dessert (follow your host's lead). They...
2004-03-01 - By identifying the structure of a molecule, scientists are able to predict its properties and behavior, information that is important for understanding chemical reactions and conducting research experiments. Now, researchers in LAS have developed a way to identify these structures faster and with greater accuracy than ever before. Seeing inside molecules takes more than a microscope; the...-
2004-02-01 - An LAS microbiologist whose discovery of a one-celled organism changed biologists' understanding of life on Earth is this year's recipient of the $500,000 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honored Carl Woese, 75, for his discovery of a third domain of life. In 1977, in...
2003-10-01 - Don't tell Chapin Rose (AB, '97, political science; JD, '00, law) that he's too young to make a mark on the world. Six years after graduating with a degree in political science from the College of LAS and three years out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's College of Law, this 28-year-old is rewriting death penalty laws and helping rebuild the Republican Party in...- 2003-10-01 - Joseph LaPalombara (AB, '47, AM, 50, political science) is the quintessential American success story. The son of Italian immigrants, he grew up on Chicago's west side in a neighborhood of row houses and patronage politics known for 150 years as Little Italy. His family dreamed of sending him to college, making him the first in their family to attend. When he dropped out of high school...
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2003-10-01 - U of I's largest college just got bigger. This past fall, the Department of Economics moved its 40 faculty from the College of Business to LAS, becoming the college's 53rd department. The change was in response to the greater compatibility between the goals of the department and those of LAS versus the College of Business. According Steven Williams, the department's head, "Business focuses more...
2003-10-01 - Scientists who study chromosomal proteins expect to find them on chromosomes, which is why Michel Bellini, a professor of cell and structural biology in LAS, and graduate student Brent Beenders were surprised to discover the chromosomal protein XCAP-E segregated from the others. They used a technique called confocal laser...
2003-10-01 - In the ongoing quest to understand human genetics, two LAS scientists have created a new process to aid in investigating how RNA splices within cells. Chemistry professor Scott Silverman and graduate student Yangming Wang have found a way to use artificial DNA enzymes to create lariat RNA, a key component in splicing named for its lariat or lasso-...-
2003-10-01 - Pop-up ads are considered mostly minor online annoyances, but a growing number have infectious code behind them that invades the user's computer and has the potential to slow performance. This code is called "spyware" and has the ability to reset the main page of a Web browser, keep track of websites visited, and fill a screen with even more pop-ups.Eric Howes, an English instructor in LAS who...
2003-10-01 - Paul C. Lauterbur, a pioneer in the development of magnetic resonance imaging and a faculty member in LAS has been awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He shares the prize with Sir Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham in England. Mansfield was a research associate in the Department of Physics at Illinois from 1962-1964. They were lauded for "seminal discoveries...
2003-10-01 - If you looked out your window and saw a tree, and then blinked and the tree was gone, you'd notice it was missing right? Researchers studying change blindness, the term characterizing when someone fails to be aware of significant changes in scenery, say that there's a good chance you wouldn't notice a thing. According to these researchers, we are aware of only a small portion of what our...- 2003-10-01 - Fakhri Bazzaz (MS, '60; PhD, '63, plant biology) has an uncanny ability to predict the future…the future of plant ecology, that is. Bazzaz doesn't need a crystal ball to make his predictions, just a nice green house, maybe a beautiful New England forest or two, and of course, a well-equipped laboratory. With these ingredients and an innate talent for recognizing areas of critical research, he...
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2003-10-01 - Anthropologists around the world are excited by the discovery of a 4,000 year-old gourd segment depicting the image of the staff god, the main deity worshipped in South America before the Europeans arrived. This small piece of gourd is important because it means that organized religion existed 1,000 years earlier than scientists originally thought....
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2003-10-01 - Weird and exciting were the words Anthony Kim (AB '03, history) used to describe his feelings on the first day he walked into the 7th grade classroom at Champaign's Franklin Middle School that was to be his own. Of course, he'd experienced many "first days" as a student teacher, but there was always a sense of distance as he entered someone else's classroom and enforced someone else's rules....
2003-10-01 - Booths, colorful signs, free stuff, dance and musical performances, and hordes of people braving the sticky summer air. It sounds like a carnival, but this scene takes place at the start of every school year at the annual Quad Day.The tradition began 32 years ago as an experiment to familiarize new students with the people, organizations, and facilities that make up campus. The idea hinged on...