LAS News Archive

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...