News Bureau

An exploded star can pose more risks to nearby planets than previously thought, according to a new study from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other X-ray telescopes. This newly identified threat involves a phase of intense X-rays that can damage the atmospheres of planets up to 160 light-years away. 

John Coleman will be the next vice chancellor for academic affairs and provost at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. 

The Latin American Ensemble, a partnership between the School of Music and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, plays a wide variety of music from Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean.

University of Illinois students Daniel Cudzich, Max Fan and Aidan Lindsay were awarded Barry M. Goldwater scholarships for their potential to contribute to the advancement of research in the natural sciences, mathematics or engineering.

The most likely outcome of the Clarence Thomas revelations is that the Supreme Court will announce new or clarified ethical standards for justices on the high court, says Jason Mazzone, the Albert E. Jenner Jr. Professor of Law and the director of the Program in Constitutional Theory, History, and Law at the College of Law at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign presents Campus Awards for Excellence in Instruction to exceptional faculty and staff members this week.

Scott Irwin, the Laurence J. Norton Chair of Agricultural Marketing in the department of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is the author of “Back to the Futures,” a book that’s part personal memoir and part explainer of the futures market.

A new look at decades of data from museum collections and surveys of leaf-litter ants in Florida reveals a steady decline in native ants and simultaneous increase in nonnative ants – even in protected natural areas of the state, researchers report.

Germán Bollero will be the next dean of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, pending approval by the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. Bollero has served as the interim dean of ACES since September 2021.  

Illinois history professor Yuridia Ramírez and Latina/Latino studies professor José de la Garza Valenzuela have been awarded 2023 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships.

Hong Kong was a battleground for the competing ideologies of China, Taiwan and the U.S. in the post-World War II period. The conflict drove the expansion and transformation of the Hong Kong media, says history professor Po-Shek Fu.

The early universe was a rambunctious place where galaxies often bumped into each other and even merged. Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and other space and ground-based observatories, astronomers made an unexpected and rare discovery: a pair of gravitationally bound quasars, both blazing away inside two merging galaxies. They existed when the universe was just 3 billion years old.

Illinois Ph.D. candidate Sulagna Chakraborty describes awareness of ticks and tick-borne disease among Illinois farmers.

Educators need to help students understand and use artificial intelligence language tools in appropriate ways to prepare them for a future in which their use is commonplace, says English and information sciences professor Ted Underwood.

A new artificial intelligence tool can predict the functions of enzymes based on their amino acid sequences, even when the enzymes are unstudied or poorly understood. The researchers said the AI tool, dubbed CLEAN, outperforms the leading state-of-the-art tools in accuracy, reliability and sensitivity. Better understanding of enzymes and their functions would be a boon for research in genomics, chemistry, industrial materials, medicine, pharmaceuticals and more.

The Illinois dance and Lyric Theatre programs will perform at the Virginia Theatre in downtown Champaign this spring for “Krannert Center at the Virginia,” a collaboration between Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and the Virginia Theatre.

For the first time, researchers have observed the process of nanoparticles self-assembling and crystalizing into solid materials. In new videos produced by the team, particles can be seen raining down, tumbling along stairsteps and sliding around before finally snapping into place to form a crystal’s signature stacked layers.

An ancient biological enzyme known as nickel-iron hydrogenase may play a key role in producing hydrogen for a renewables-based energy economy, researchers said. Careful study of the enzyme has led chemists from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to design a synthetic molecule that mimics the hydrogen gas-producing chemical reaction performed by the enzyme.

The eighth annual Illini Success report shows that recent University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign graduates experienced exceptional success in finding jobs, enrolling in graduate school or beginning volunteer programs. The report found that 95% of graduates secured a “first destination” within six months of graduation.

As new environmental regulations are rolling out to mitigate the industry-retired long-chain chemicals known as PFAS in drinking water, there are concerns regarding a new breed of “forever chemicals” called short-chain PFAS. Research from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is helping shift the focus to include mitigation of the chemicals – which researchers say are just as persistent as, more mobile and harder to remove from the environment than their long-chain counterparts.

History professor Teri Chettiar said emotional well-being was seen as a key factor for a stable democracy in the period following World War II.

Five University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professors have been named University Scholars in recognition of their excellence in teaching, scholarship and service. The award is presented by the University of Illinois System to faculty members from the Chicago, Springfield and Urbana universities.

New research by Gregory Girolami, the William and Janet Lycan Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois, uncovered previously unknown details about Margaret Bryan, the mysterious author of early astronomy and physics textbooks.

The new book “Crisis in the Professions: The New Dark Age” examines the social, political and economic forces that are changing the practice and public perceptions of elite professions such as law, medicine and higher education.

The paintings by Shozo Sato, the founder of Japan House and an emeritus professor of theatre and of art at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, explore American landscapes, floral motifs and memories of postwar Japan.

The International Criminal Court’s recent issuance of arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin effectively means any country cooperating with Russia is now cooperating with an accused war criminal, says Illinois law professor Patrick Keenan, an expert in human rights law and international criminal law.

Revenue from collegiate sports TV networks may decrease cross-subsidization of athletic programs by other units at these colleges, but athletic programs' spending also seemed to increase, scholars Jennifer Delaney and Tyler Kearney found.

Lexi Gomez is knee-deep in a pond when I first see her in the U. of I. Plant Biology Greenhouse and Conservatory. A fifth-year senior who will graduate this semester, Gomez dips a net in the dark water to clear the pond of debris fallen from the lush jungle of tropical plants that looms above. She attacks the work with gusto.

Six-time Olympic medalist Jackie Joyner-Kersee will serve as the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s commencement speaker May 13 in Memorial Stadium.

The Illinois Neurodiversity Initiative at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is accepting applications from neurodiverse students who will be incoming freshmen in the 2023 fall semester.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has been chosen to lead the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago – a new biomedical hub – along with the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. The three-university team was selected to lead the new biomedical hub as part of a competitive application process for a research initiative explicitly focused on measuring human biology.

One year into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the most likely outcome is a stalemate, despite the mounting cost in blood and treasure, said Edward A. Kolodziej, Emeritus Research Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an expert in international relations and global politics.

A new study is the first to compare the sound exposures of fetuses in the last 16 weeks of pregnancy with their age-matched premature peers. The analysis reveals profound differences in their exposures to noise, language and the biological sounds of the mother, with implications for the infants’ development.

A new book from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign anthropology professor Kathryn Clancy takes an unflinching look at the many ways humans have struggled – and often failed – to understand one of the greatest mysteries of human biology: menstruation.

Sociology professor Kevin Leicht is co-leading the development of a software app that will alert clinicians to medical misinformation that's circulating on social media so they can address it with their patients if desired.

There’s nothing sacrosanct about the five-day workweek, which is long overdue for an overhaul, says Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois.

The 2023 Insect Fear Film Festival celebrates 40 years of entertaining and educating people about insects and their close relatives. This year’s festival features living fossil organisms.

Black and Latina women had high rates of anxiety and depressive symptoms during the pandemic, but prayer had differing effects, kinesiology and community health professor Sandraluz Lara-Cinisomo found in a study.

It’s not easy to make sense of quantum-scale motion, but a new mathematical theory could help, providing insight into the various computing, electrochemical and biological systems. Chenghao Zhang, a physics graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and chemistry professor Martin Gruebele performed a computational analysis of the new mathematical theory developed by Rice University theorist Peter Wolynes and theoretical chemist David Logan at Oxford University. The theory gives a simple prediction for the threshold at which large quantum systems switch from orderly motion like a clock to random, erratic motion like asteroids moving around in the early solar system.

A series of eight videos available online highlights the research of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign history professor Craig Koslofsky on ways of marking and understanding skin in the early modern world.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign announced Dean’s List honorees and graduates for the fall semester 2022, as well as those who graduated in August 2022. 

The U.S. methamphetamine mortality rate increased fiftyfold between 1999 and 2021, with most of the added deaths also involving heroin or fentanyl, researchers report in the American Journal of Public Health.

Ryan Cordell, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor of information sciences and of English, is leading a project to examine how stories of racial violence circulated in late 19th century and early 20th century newspapers and how those stories relate to trends in contemporary social media.

A new framework for studying the intersection of climate anomalies and social conflicts finds a strong link between temperature fluctuations and aggregated global conflicts, says research co-written Ujjal Kumar Mukherjee, a professor of business administration at the Gies College of Business at Illinois.

The nitrate runoff problem, a source of carcinogens and a cause of suffocating algal blooms in U.S. waterways, may not be all gloom and doom. A new study led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign demonstrates an approach for the integrated capture and conversion of nitrate-contaminated waters into valuable ammonia within a single electrochemical cell.

Public transit systems offering broad coverage of stops and routes may still underserve the communities that rely on them the most, according to a new University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign study. The study, by former civil and environmental engineering student Dale Robbennolt and Applied Research Institute senior research scientist Ann-Perry Witmer, applies contextual engineering to help determine lapses in equity in public bus transportation access using data from the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District as a case study.

Chemistry professor Mei Shen is among 126 early-career researchers receiving the 2023 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. According to the foundation, the awards “honor extraordinary U.S. and Canadian researchers whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders.” Awardees receive a two-year $75,000 fellowship to advance their research.

A new exhibition at Krannert Art Museum, “Pattern and Process,” examines how artists use pattern to understand natural, physical and personal realms.

Educational psychology professor Kaylin Ratner found in a study of more than 200 adolescents that feeling a sense of purpose had a significant impact on teens' emotional well-being.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is among the U.S. colleges and universities that produced the highest number of applicants selected for the 2022-23 Fulbright U.S. Student and Fulbright U.S. Scholar programs, as announced today by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.