LAS News Archive

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...

2004-07-01 - While researching the life and career of Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay (1889-1948), LAS English professor William Maxwell found startling evidence of this country's investigation into black radicalism. The "canonically bold poet" who against all odds and his own deleterious tendencies came to...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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,...

2003-10-01 - Every January for the past three years, John Micetich (BS, '69, psychology) and his wife have closed up their home in sunny San Diego and moved halfway across the country to spend the winter in Champaign-Urbana. It isn't the weather that attracts them to the Midwest. Micetich, a 1969 graduate in...