News Bureau

Krannert Art Museum at the U. of I. has published a multiauthored catalogue in conjunction with the exhibition “World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean.”

On view at the museum, located at Sixth Street and Peabody Drive in Champaign, until March 24, “World on the Horizon” will travel to the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., in May and then to Fowler Museum at UCLA in October.

News reports, social media campaigns such as #MeToo are raising awareness of sexual misconduct and helping survivors find their voices, says educational psychologist Anita Hund

Thomas B. “Tom” Berns ... Richard “Dick” Blaney ... Karen M. Dudas

Ruth Nicole Brown, a professor of gender and women’s studies at Illinois, received a Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship for $50,000 to expand Black Girls Genius Week, a series of humanities-based workshops for African-American middle school- and high school-aged girls, from central Illinois to Chicago, San Diego and Columbia, South Carolina.

The Ecological Society of America has named Wendy H. Yang, a professor of plant biology and geology at Illinois, as an Early Career Fellow. The society’s fellowship program recognizes the many ways in which its members contribute to ecological research and discovery, communication, education, pedagogy, management and policy.

The University of Illinois theatre department is celebrating its 50th anniversary with events March 3-5.

Scientists report in the journal eNeuro that they’ve built an artificially intelligent ocean predator that behaves a lot like the original flesh-and-blood organism on which it was modeled. The virtual creature, “Cyberslug,” reacts to food and responds to members of its own kind much like the actual animal, the sea slug Pleurobranchaea californica, does.

Researchers at the University of Illinois College of Medicine and Carle Illinois College of Medicine have found that creating short videos that explain information presented during physiology lectures makes teaching easier for medical educators and learning easier for their students.

For the seventh time in the past eight years, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is among the top producers of Fulbright U.S. Student Awards, part of the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program.

Researchers have developed an imaging technique that uses a tiny, super sharp needle to nudge a single nanoparticle into different orientations and capture 2-D images to help reconstruct a 3-D picture. The method demonstrates imaging of individual nanoparticles at different orientations while in a laser-induced excited state.

A big data research study by a University of Illinois professor shows a decline in the prominence of female characters in fiction and in the number of female authors from the 19th century to the 20th century.

As far as anyone can tell, the cold-water crayfish Faxonius eupunctus makes its home in a 30-mile stretch of the Eleven Point River and nowhere else in the world. According to a new study, the animal is most abundant in the middle part its range, a rocky expanse in southern Missouri – with up to 35,000 cubic feet of chilly Ozark river water flowing by each second.

A new study links doing one’s homework, being interested and behaving responsibly in high school to better academic and career success as many as 50 years later. This effect, reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, holds true even after accounting for parental income, IQ and other factors known to influence achievement, researchers report.

Marilois Barker ... Donald “Don” Lee Day ...Steven J. D’Urso ... Charles Walter “Erik” Eriksen ... Jack Theodore Harroun ... C. Rex Mahannah ... Kenneth Neil Statzer

Swapping food stamps for food boxes would mean scrapping 'the most successful government program we have going today,' said U. of I. professor Craig Gundersen

Spurlock Museum of World Cultures at Illinois invites faculty, staff and graduate students to attend an open house on specialized research and learning opportunities on Thursday, March 8, from 3-6 p.m. The museum welcomes proposals for collaborative exhibitions, research projects and public programs. The event highlights opportunities for using the museum’s collection of more than 50,000 objects from six continents for classes and outreach.

Iron deficiency in the first four weeks of a piglet’s life – equivalent to roughly four months in a human infant – impairs the development of key brain structures, scientists report. The abnormalities remain even after weeks of iron supplementation begun later in life, the researchers found.

Spurlock Museum of World Cultures at Illinois will hold its annual Winter Tales concert, a celebration of American Indian storytelling, on Sunday, March 4, from 1-2:15 p.m. The featured storyteller is SleepyEye LaFromboise of the Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and Tonawanda Seneca tribes. This family concert is free and no advanced reservations are required.

Depictions of medical doctors in comics have become less stereotypical and more realistic, says Carol Tilley, a University of Illinois professor of information sciences and a comics historian and scholar.

The boilerplate text that nobody reads when signing up for an online service has very tenuous legal footing, said Robin B. Kar, a University of Illinois legal scholar and internationally recognized expert in contract law.

Every significant emancipation of black enslaved people in North America came with plans to relocate them to tropical areas, says a U. of I. historian.

Geologic activity within stable portions of Earth’s uppermost layer may have occurred more recently than previously believed.

A new study of middle-aged women found that sleep problems vary across the stages of menopause, yet are consistently correlated with hot flashes and depression.

A University of Illinois graphic design professor has developed a cellphone app that enables users to report suspected cases of human trafficking anonymously.

Donna Kuhlman ... Elsie Willfong ... John E. Zehr

Leah Matchett, of Grand Haven, Michigan, and an alumna of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is one of 49 students selected in the first year of the Knight-Hennessy Scholar program for postgraduate study at Stanford University.

Social media data can be used as an additional source of information to gauge public opinion about health issues alongside traditional data sources like phone-based polling, says new research co-written by U. of I. psychology professor Dolores Albarracin.

Three Illinois scientists are among 126 recipients of the 2018 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. According to the foundation, the awards “honor early career scholars whose achievements mark them as among the very best scientific minds working today.” Winners receive a two-year $65,000 fellowship to further their research.

A study of foxes offers new insights into the brain changes that occur in wild canids as they become more tame, researchers report. The study links fox domestication to changes in gene activity in the pituitary gland, a brain center that kicks out hormones to regulate various bodily functions, including the stress response.

MIRI, MALAYSIA — We awake from our post-training slumber at 6:30 a.m. for an activity unlike any of the team-building exercises we have experienced so far. This is only the first week of training for the Fulbright Program here. There are nearly 100 of us on this waterfall hike, braving the rain and humidity together to swim in one of Malaysia’s hidden pools.

The 35th Insect Fear Film Festival at the University of Illinois will focus on ticks, which are not insects but arachnids and are important for humans to understand as they are vectors for Lyme disease.

A drug-carrying microsphere within a cell-bearing microcapsule could be the key to transplanting insulin-secreting pig pancreas cells into human patients whose own cells have been destroyed by type I diabetes.

Krannert Art Museum will host Art Remastered, a performance by six local musicians who composed new music in response to a piece of art at the museum.

The University YMCA announces the Friday Forum lecture series “Art + Activism: Transforming Silence into Action.” The series begins Feb. 16 with Ricardo Levins Morales’   discussion of how art can be used to address personal and historical trauma, challenge common beliefs, assist in building alliances and contribute to culture change.

Fewer than half of parents of children with disabilities make long-term care plans to ensure their child's needs are met if the parent dies or can no longer care for the child, University of Illinois special education professor Meghan Burke found.

Robert Duane Mackey ... Kevin Daniel Peterson ... James Richard "Dick" Teague

Physicians played a key role in defining racial differences in the age of slavery, planting ideas that have carried to the present day, says a U. of I. historian in a new book.

I slowly turn each page of Florence Lee’s large paper scrapbook, making sure not to wrinkle any of the items she placed inside. Its contents offer a snapshot of student life in the early 20th century at the University of Illinois: a laminated orange and blue button from a homecoming football game, a brochure from the Anti-Cigarette League of America, ribbons and tickets from Dad’s Day events and dozens of photographs of scenes around campus, including personal photographs of Florence Lee with her family and friends. All of these items were either glued or, in the case of some of the flat paper items, had their corners tucked into angled slots cut into the pages. The items that Florence Lee placed in this scrapbook come from her undergraduate years at the University of Illinois – 1917-20. This memento offers a window into that time.

The university’s Solar Farm resumed full electricity production Jan. 25 after repairs to the site’s three inverters were completed. Inverters change direct current to alternating current to prepare energy for delivery to the campus electrical grid. The installation went offline Oct. 29 after a malfunction of the array’s electrical system.

Krannert Center for the Performing Arts has announced a five-year, $30 million fundraising initiative.

January in Illinois was colder and drier than normal without much snow, according to Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel of the Illinois State Water Survey at Illinois.

A new exhibit at the U. of I.’s Spurlock Museum offers a glimpse of the artistic and spiritual legacy of the American Indian people who built Cahokia, a great, thousand-year-old urban center on the Mississippi River. “Cahokia’s Religion: The Art of Red Goddesses, Black Drink and the Underworld” displays artifacts recently returned from the St. Louis Art Museum, including three of more than a dozen red carved-stone goddesses that the Illinois State Archaeological Survey found in our excavations of this ancient metropolis. You can view these figures alongside other cultural objects that reveal a civilization’s core beliefs and values. 

Robert J. Cheek ... Alfred Wilhelm Hubler ... Kenneth Earl Raymond

The exhibit “Cahokia’s Religion: The Art of Red Goddesses, Black Drink and the Underworld” is on display at the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures at Illinois. Created in cooperation with the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, the exhibit features objects from the ancient city of Cahokia, which was located near what is now Collinsville, Illinois, as well as objects from surrounding areas.

The National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students recognized Holly Herrera, the coordinator of transfer advising at Illinois, with the Bonita C. Jacobs Transfer Champion Rising Star Award. She will be honored Wednesday, Feb. 7, during the opening session of the 16th Annual Conference of the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students at Loews Atlanta Hotel.

The University Scholars program recognizes excellence in teaching, scholarship and service. Six Urbana campus faculty members have been named University Scholars and will be honored at a campus reception Jan. 31.

Whether or not survivors share their stories publicly, they often carry lifelong scars associated with being sexually traumatized

New research co-written by Gies College of Business professor Ujjal Kumar Mukherjee studies the interdependence of affordability, awareness and access for health care delivery by nonprofits in underserved countries.

Following the Graduate Employees Organization’s issuance of an intent to strike notice, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost Andreas Cangellaris shared information with the campus community today. 

The warmth of the cookstove fire belies the blustery wind outside, whipping through the pines and occasionally lifting the corrugated steel roof under which we sit uneasily. I am with my volunteer interpreter/research assistant/daughter, sitting at a small wooden table in the kitchen. We are in Llano Largo, the highest point in Central America and also the client community of my course in international water-system design, Honduras Water Project.