LAS News Archive

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 - 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 - 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 - 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...

2005-10-01 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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....

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 "...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

2005-06-01 - The year was 1937 when strikers at the Republic Steel Mill on the southeast side of Chicago met at a neighborhood bar. After deciding to picket, the crowd began to move across a field next to the factory, many carrying signs and U.S. flags. Violence was not expected, which was why some workers had...

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...

2005-06-01 - Over a span of eight years, from 1935 to 1943, a cadre of 13 government-sponsored photographers captured the fabric of rural America by exposing the profound poverty experienced by migrant workers and tenant farmers, who were some of the nation's most invisible citizens during the Great Depression....

2005-06-01 - For Tayari Jones, the recent reopening of the 20-year-old case against convicted child murderer Wayne Williams is not so much a revisiting of ancient wounds but rather like agitating "a bone poorly set-painful, crooked, and gimpy." The LAS assistant professor of...