News Bureau

Small sample sizes in studies using functional MRI to investigate brain connectivity and function are common in neuroscience, despite years of warnings that such studies likely lack sufficient statistical power. A new analysis reveals that task-based fMRI experiments involving typical sample sizes of about 30 participants are only modestly replicable. This means that independent efforts to repeat the experiments are as likely to challenge as to confirm the original results.

Krannert Art Museum’s landscape photography exhibition looks at our relationship with nature, includes workshops with noted local photographers.

The Illinois Fire Service Institute will host the 94th Annual Fire College on June 7-10 in Champaign. The event will bring together more than 400 first responders from across the state and country to experience in-depth, hands-on training.

Eleven faculty members were honored with the Provost’s Campus Distinguished Promotion Award for 2018.

Searching for reptiles and amphibians is often quite tedious. You have to carefully scan ahead of each step for movement before a snake gets away, or spend hours flipping over logs to find the particular salamander you are looking for. Today, we’re searching for turtles. Luckily, we have help.

The statewide average temperature for May in Illinois was 70.6 degrees, 7.9 degrees above normal and the warmest May on record, according to Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel at the Illinois State Water Survey, part of the Prairie Research Institute at Illinois. The old record was 69.4 degrees in 1962.

Two Chicago educators who recently received Golden Apple Awards for their innovative teaching practices will be the keynote speakers at the 2018 Beginning Teacher Conference at the University of Illinois.

Using a new algorithm, University of Illinois researchers may have found the solution to an age-old dilemma plaguing satellite imagery – whether to sacrifice high spatial resolution in the interest of generating images more frequently, or vice versa. The team’s new tool eliminates this trade-off by fusing high-resolution and high-frequency satellite data into one integrated product, and can generate 30-meter daily continuous images going back to the year 2000. 

Two University of Illinois students are among 60 students in the U.S. to receive a U.K. Summer Fulbright placement.

Neighborhood characteristics are associated with late-stage diagnoses and higher mortality rates among urban African-American women, a new study shows.

A new genetic study of ancient individuals in the Americas and their contemporary descendants finds that two populations that diverged from one another 18,000 to 15,000 years ago remained apart for millennia before mixing again. This historic “reconvergence” occurred before or during their expansion to the southern continent.

Tom Wyles Day ... Scott Ray White

University of Illinois aerospace engineering professor Scott R. White, an innovator of self-healing and self-regulating materials, died Monday of cancer at age 55.

When an employer credibly cites harm to its business interests or reputation from employee speech, the employee has very little legal recourse if they’re fired because of it, said University of Illinois labor and employment relations professor Michael LeRoy, an expert on employment law.

Researchers report in a new study that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori – a major contributor to gastritis, ulcers and stomach cancer – resists the body’s immune defenses by shutting down energy production within the cells of the stomach lining that serve as a barrier to infection.

Saturday afternoons for your typical Malaysian high school student are drastically different than what they’re like in the United States. The overriding emphasis here on government exams and grades often confines these youngsters to hours of extra classes and studying, even on the weekends. One of our jobs as Fulbright English teaching assistants is to try to make learning fun by organizing special camps that promote conversational English. But as we get started, the students seem a bit wary.

Daniel Lee Beckman ... Susan Kathleen Connelly ... Paul Krabbe ... Carolyn G. (Shaw) Mink ... Mete A. Sozen ... Marilyn Upah-Bant

Women in the Champaign-Urbana area who experience perinatal depression and their health care providers will meet with an international group of experts June 1-2 in Champaign for a workshop about new methods of detecting and treating the mood disorder.

University of Illinois engineers built a 3-D printer that offers a sweet solution to making detailed structures that commercial 3-D printers can’t: Rather than a layer-upon-layer solid shell, it produces a delicate network of thin ribbons of hardened isomalt, the type of sugar alcohol used to make throat lozenges.

The water-soluble, biodegradable glassy sugar structures have multiple applications in biomedical engineering, cancer research and device manufacturing.

A new book co-written by University of Illinois Gies College of Business professor Jeffrey Loewenstein aims to demystify the creative process.

A study of ancient mound builders who lived hundreds of years ago on the Mississippi River Delta near present-day New Orleans offers new insights into how Native peoples selected the landforms that supported their villages and earthen mounds – and why these sites were later abandoned.

University of Illinois design students created immersive reality scenarios to help people who are soon to be released from prison learn how to meet certain challenges.

The impact of unpredictable state funding on students and postsecondary institutions will be the focus of an upcoming conference at the University of Illinois.

Illinois professor Scott Althaus tells the story of his extended family’s five-year search for the details of a relative’s last bombing mission during World War II, which also resulted in finding his plane.

Under a low-workload scenario, bank employees tend to take performance-enhancing risks. But in a high-workload scenario, employees make more errors due to multitasking, said Yuqian Xu, a professor of business administration at the Gies College of Business at Illinois.

University of Illinois researchers say they now know how to track and map drug and gene delivery vehicles to evaluate which are most effective at infiltrating cells and getting to their targets, insight that could guide development of new pharmaceutical agents. The researchers described their tracking system and their findings on the most effective delivery vehicles in the journal Nature Communications. 

Two University of Illinois seniors are among 221 nationwide recipients of David L. Boren Scholarships, awarded by the National Security Education Program to provide undergraduate students experience in world regions critical to U.S. interests.

Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, assassinated 50 years ago, was prone to blunt talk that often made him controversial, says an expert on political rhetoric.

Brazilians with less education are more likely to self-report as being in poor health, according to a study using data from nationwide surveys distributed every five years from 1998 to 2013. The study also found that general subjective health did not improve over the study period, even though more people gained education throughout the study, indicating that other factors associated with poor education may need to be addressed to improve self-perceptions of health.

The decision in Murphy v. NCAA will likely usher in an era of unregulated, readily available sports gambling on smartphones, said John W. Kindt, a professor emeritus of business administration at the University of Illinois and a leading national gambling critic.

In health care, four service-quality proxies – bedside manner, diagnosis accuracy, waiting time and service time – disproportionately affect demand for patient care, said Yuqian Xu, a professor of business administration at the Gies College of Business at Illinois.

Scientists report they can now drive two-electron chemical reactions, bringing them one step closer to building a carbon-recycling system that can harvest solar energy to efficiently convert CO2 and water into liquid fuels.

Krannert Center for the Performing Arts will kick off a two-season 50th anniversary celebration this fall.

The future of electronic devices lies partly within the “internet of things” – the network of devices, vehicles and appliances embedded within electronics to enable connectivity and data exchange. University of Illinois engineers are helping realize this future by minimizing the size of one notoriously large element of integrated circuits used for wireless communication – the transformer.

Biochemists at the University of Illinois have isolated a protein supercomplex from a bacterial membrane that, like a battery, generates a voltage across the bacterial membrane. The voltage is used to make ATP, a key energy currency of life. The new findings, reported in the journal Nature, will inform future efforts to obtain the atomic structures of large membrane protein supercomplexes.

A new technique that uses tiny elastic balls filled with fluorescent nanoparticles aims to expand the understanding of the mechanical forces that exist between cells, researchers report. A University of Illinois-led team has demonstrated the quantification of 3-D forces within cells living in petri dishes as well as live specimens. This research may unlock some of the mysteries related to embryonic development and cancer stem cells, i.e., tumor-repopulating cells.

Two Illinois urban planning professors say responding to extreme heat waves has become more difficult in Chicago, as the most vulnerable residents have become more dispersed throughout the area.

Richard E. Henderson ... Lois Evelyn Overmyer ... Christie Tucker

The Office of the Provost recognized four University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faculty members April 25 with Campus Awards for Excellence in Faculty Leadership.

Susan Burton, a nationally recognized advocate for restoring civil and human rights to formerly incarcerated women, will discuss her new book and the challenges of re-entering society after prison at an event Tuesday, May 15,  in Champaign.

Makers of cars, planes, buses – anything that needs strong, lightweight and heat resistant parts – are poised to benefit from a new manufacturing process that requires only a quick touch from a small heat source to send a cascading hardening wave through a polymer. Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a new polymer-curing process that could reduce the cost, time and energy needed, compared with the current manufacturing process.

Craig A. Stone is the new executive director of public safety and chief of police for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, effective June 18. He succeeds Jeff Christensen, who retired Dec. 31.

News media passes for Saturday's campuswide commencement at Memorial Stadium are available through Friday at the Office of Public Affairs, 507 E. Green St., Room 319, Champaign. 

An exhibition at Krannert Art Museum will celebrate the work of graduating Illinois seniors in art and design.

The CRISPR-Cas9 system has given researchers the power to precisely edit selected genes. Now, researchers have used it to develop a technology that can target any gene in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and turn it off by deleting single letters from its DNA sequence.

Workplace violence is an endemic problem for front-line health care workers in Illinois, says new research from U. of I. labor and employment relations professor Emily E. LB. Twarog.

Common cuckoos and oriental cuckoos in eastern Russia appear to be expanding their breeding range into western Alaska, where songbirds are naive to the cuckoos’ wily ways, researchers report. A new study suggests the North American birds could suffer significant losses if cuckoos become established in Alaska.

A brain-imaging study offers new support for the idea that infants can accurately track other people’s beliefs. When 7-month-old infants in the study viewed videos of an actor who saw – or failed to see – an object being moved to a new location, activity in a brain region known to play a role in processing others’ beliefs changed in the infants, just as it did in adults watching the same videos.

Chris Roegge, the executive director of the Council on Teacher Education at the University of Illinois, discusses whether new legislation in Illinois will remedy the state's shortage of teachers.

Illinois professor Mara Wade has been awarded a Getty Residential Scholar Grant. She’ll use the residency to work on her book on the relationship between public monuments and cultural politics in the city of Nuernberg.