Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Going Green: Allerton Park and Retreat Center

The Allerton Park and Retreat Center near Monticello is doing its part for the environment. Its sustainability efforts include the recent installation of an outdoor wood-burning boiler that heats five park buildings: the visitor’s center greenhouse, public restrooms, operations building and two workshops.

The initiatives were made possible with the aid of a $25,500 Student Sustainability Committee grant. The boiler will save the park more than $10,000 in heating bills per year.

Park officials were notified recently that proposed geothermal projects, which will provide an alternative energy source for four buildings in the park, which include the visitor’s center main building, Evergreen Lodge, gatehouse and House in the Woods, have received $23,000 of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds from the state. The project also has received tentative approval for a $25,000 zero-interest loan from the SSC. The entire project is estimated to cost $82,000.

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Announcements Marcelo Garcia, professor of civil and environmental engineering at The Grainger College of Engineering.

Illinois faculty member elected to National Academy of Engineering

Champaign, Ill. — Marcelo Garcia, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Social sciences Male and female student embracing on the quad with flowering redbud tree and the ACES library in the background. Photo by Michelle Hassel

Dating is not broken, but the trajectories of relationships have changed

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — According to some popular culture writers and online posts by discouraged singles lamenting their inability to find romantic partners, dating is “broken,” fractured by the social isolation created by technology, pandemic lockdowns and potential partners’ unrealistic expectations. Yet two studies of college students conducted a decade apart found that their ideas about […]

Engineering Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Nishant Garg, center, is joined by fellow researchers, from left: Yujia Min, Hossein Kabir, Nishant Garg, center, Chirayu Kothari and M. Farjad Iqbal, front right. In front are examples of clay samples dissolved at different concentrations in a NaOH solution. The team invented a new test that can predict the performance of cementitious materials in mere 5 minutes. This is in contrast to the standard ASTM tests, which take up to 28 days. This new advance enables real-time quality control at production plants of emerging, sustainable materials. Photo taken at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025. (Photo by Fred Zwicky / University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Researchers develop a five-minute quality test for sustainable cement industry materials

A new test developed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign can predict the performance of a new type of cementitious construction material in five minutes — a significant improvement over the current industry standard method, which takes seven or more days to complete. This development is poised to advance the use of next-generation resources called supplementary cementitious materials — or SCMs — by speeding up the quality-check process before leaving the production floor.

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