News Bureau

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Gene E. Robinson, the Swanlund Chair of entomology and the director of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois, has been selected to deliver the Center for Advanced Study's 23rd Annual Lecture, continuing the center's tradition of showcasing the university's most distinguished scholars. Robinson's lecture, which begins at 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 19 at Spurlock Museum on campus, is free and open to the public.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Budding scientists will be able to get a taste and feel for neuroscience when researchers at the University of Illinois host their annual Brain Awareness Day on Saturday (April 14) at the Orpheum Children's Science Museum in Champaign.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — It took decades of painstaking work, but research geneticist Ram Singh managed to cross a popular soybean variety (“Dwight” Glycine max) with a related wild perennial plant that grows like a weed in Australia, producing the first fertile soybean plants that are resistant to soybean rust, soybean cyst nematode and other pathogens of soy.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Jake Carpenter-Thompson, of Lake City, Mich., an M.D./Ph.D. student in neuroscience at the University of Illinois, is one of two graduate students nationwide awarded a research grant from the American Tinnitus Association.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Extreme weather, drought, heavy rainfall and increasing temperatures are a fact of life in many parts of the U.S. as a result of human-induced climate change, researchers report today in a new assessment. These and other changes will continue and likely increase in intensity into the future, the scientists found.

CHAMPAIGN, lll. - In 1990, a team of researchers and medical experts placed an ancient Egyptian mummy into a computed tomography (CT) scanner at a hospital in Central Illinois, hoping to learn what they could about the individual shrouded inside its linen cocoon. Those scans, along with X-rays and analyses of fragments collected from the fraying base of the mummy, revealed that it was a child from a wealthy family, likely from the Roman period of ancient Egypt.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Microbiologist Carl Woese of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been elected as a foreign member of the Royal Society, the world's oldest continuously active scientific academy in the world.

A Minute With™... crop sciences professor and weed expert Aaron Hager

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Measurements of the ion-current through the open state of a membrane-protein's ion channel have allowed scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to obtain a detailed picture of the effect of the protein microenvironment on the affinity of ionizable amino-acid residues for protons.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Very thin but hardy, unblemished skin and slow developing gills appear to be keys to survival for newly hatched Antarctic notothenioids, a group of fish whose adults thrive in icy waters because of antifreeze proteins (AFPs) in their blood.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The queen honey bee is genetically identical to the workers in her hive, but she lives 10 times longer and - unlike her sterile sisters - remains reproductively viable throughout life. A study from the University of Illinois sheds new light on the molecular mechanisms that account for this divergence. The study appears in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A $6.2 million five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health will fund the establishment of a Nanomedicine Development Center to be directed by Eric G. Jakobsson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Researchers studying how proteins called helicases travel along strands of DNA have found that when the proteins hit an obstacle they snap back to where they began, repeating the process over and over, possibly playing a preventative role in keeping the genome intact.

A Minute With™... plant biology professor Evan DeLucia

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A protein that undesirably shields a skin poxvirus from the immune system may become the key ingredient in a new topical treatment for inflammatory diseases, say medical researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A protein known primarily for its role in killing cells also plays a part in memory formation, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report. Their work exploring how zebra finches learn songs could have implications for treatment of neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Researchers have discovered a new family of agents that inhibit the growth of estrogen-dependent breast cancer cells. The finding, described today at a meeting of the Endocrine Society, has opened an avenue of research into new drugs to combat estrogen-dependent breast cancers.

CHAMPAIGN, lll. - Douglas A. Mitchell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois, is a recipient of the 2011 National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award. The award recognizes bold ideas from some of the nation's most promising new scientists.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Two land-grant universities have developed a new approach to global bio-exploration, one that returns most of the fruits of discovery to the countries that provide the raw materials on which the research depends. The Global Institute for Bio-Exploration, a joint initiative of the University of Illinois and Rutgers University, has become a model of sustainable, non-exploitive research in the developing world.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Fecal matter of red colobus monkeys collected in western Uganda has yielded a wealth of knowledge about human land-use change and wildlife health and conservation. The main lesson, researchers say, is that the intensity of tree removal translates directly to parasite populations and the risk of infection of their hosts.

CHAMPAIGN, lll. - With the BeeSpace Navigator, University of Illinois researchers have created both a curation tool for genetic biologists and a new approach to searching for information.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A new approach to outwit resistance to antibiotics has been discovered by a team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

CHAMPAIGN, lll. - University of Illinois animal sciences professor Harris Lewin is a recipient of the 2011 Wolf Prize in Agriculture. He shares the prize with James R. Cook, of Washington State University.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Ed Diener, the Joseph R. Smiley Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois, is a 2012 recipient of the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. The award "recognizes distinguished theoretical or empirical contributions to basic research in psychology." The award is typically given to three scientists each year.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - By designing a molecular bridge, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have forged a successful pathway through a complex ocean of barriers: They've changed the function of a protein using a co-evolution approach.

CHAMPAIGN, lll. - Researchers at the University of Illinois have designed a small molecule that blocks an aberrant pathway associated with myotonic dystrophy type 1, the most common form of muscular dystrophy.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A courtroom jury views a computer animation of a vehicle accident or heinous crime. Does it help bring a conviction or acquittal? With no clear standards for animations that re-create incidents, the verdict is still out, and, for now, it may depend on which side created the simulation, researchers say.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The infant mortality rate set forth as a national goal in the federal government's Healthy People 2020 initiative is likely to be attained by only one demographic group - highly educated white mothers, the authors of a new study say.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The neurotransmitter acetylcholine is an essential chemical communicator, carrying impulses from neurons to skeletal muscle cells and many parts of the nervous system. Now researchers at the University of Illinois have painstakingly mapped the interior of a key component of the relay system that allows acetylcholine to get its message across. Their findings, which appear in the current issue of Nature Structure & Molecular Biology, reveal how the muscle nicotinic acetylcholine receptor responds to a burst of acetylcholine on the surface of a cell.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Which is better, giving more food to a few hungry people or letting some food go to waste so that everyone gets a share? A study appearing this week in Science finds that most people choose the latter, and that the brain responds in unique ways to inefficiency and inequity.

U. of I. psychology professor Nicole Allen, an expert in community responses to domestic violence

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Scientists have known for more than a decade that a protein associated with the HIV virus is good at crossing cell membranes, but they didn't know how it worked. A multidisciplinary team from the University of Illinois has solved the mystery, and their findings could improve the design of therapeutic agents that cross a variety of membrane types.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - The National Institutes of Health has awarded $7 million to a team of researchers from the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin to discover, engineer and produce a promising - yet little explored - class of antibiotic agents.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A well known anti-cancer agent in certain vegetables has just had its reputation enhanced. The compound, in broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables, has been found to be effective in disrupting late stages of cell growth in breast cancer.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Tropical forests are among the most diverse plant communities on earth, and scientists have labored for decades to identify the ecological and evolutionary processes that created and maintain them. A key question is whether all tree species are equivalent in their use of resources - water, light and nutrients - or whether each species has its own niche.

CHAMPAIGN, lll. - A turning point in the history of life occurred 2 billion to 3 billion years ago with the unprecedented appearance and dramatic rise of molecular oxygen. Now researchers report they have identified an enzyme that was the first - or among the first - to generate molecular oxygen on Earth.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - New research from the University of Illinois suggests that weight-loss campaigns that promote exercise may actually cause people to eat more.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Animal geneticist Harris A. Lewin today was named the first director of the Post Genomic Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, pending approval by the Board of Trustees at its May 15 meeting in Urbana. The institute will be a facility that officials say will put Illinois at the forefront of modern biological research.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Helicobacter pylori is one tough bug. It can survive in the human stomach, a zone with a pH somewhere between that of lemon juice and battery acid. Now researchers have discovered how an H. pylori toxin gets into cells, a feat that helps the bacterium live in one of the most inhospitable environments in the body.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Twenty-eight years after intense selective logging stopped in the region now known as Uganda's Kibale National Park, the red-tailed guenon (Cercophithecus ascanius) is a primate still in decline.

CHAMPAIGN, lll. - Researchers have engineered new sensors that fluoresce in the presence of compounds that interact with estrogen receptors in human cells. The sensors detect natural or human-made substances that alter estrogenic signaling in the body.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - There's no such thing as a good place to have a natural disaster, nor has there ever been an appropriate site to release toxic pollutants. But scientists have long recognized that some areas can handle such catastrophes better than others. As early as the 1970s, they used socioeconomic data from the U.S. Census to develop a tool called the Social Vulnerability Index, known as SoVI, to gauge the likely resilience of different communities.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Researchers at the University of Illinois have found that a molecular pathway known to have a role in the progression of bone cancer in humans is also critical to the pathology of skeletal tumors in dogs and cats. Their work could lead to advances in the palliative care of companion animals afflicted with osteosarcoma.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Herbert E. Whiteley, the head of the department of pathobiology and veterinary science at the University of Connecticut, will return to the University of Illinois as the dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine, pending approval of the UI Board of Trustees at its meeting May 23-24 in Springfield.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Two studies in mice add to the evidence that the phthalate DEHP, a plasticizing agent used in auto upholstery, baby toys, building materials and many other consumer products, can undermine female reproductive health, in part by disrupting the growth and function of the ovaries.

CHAMPAIGN, lll. - For decades, scientists assumed that the ovary alone produced steroid hormones during pregnancy. In a new study in mice, however, researchers demonstrate that once an embryo attaches to the uterine wall, the uterus itself actually synthesizes the estrogen needed to sustain the pregnancy.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Driving with one hand on the wheel and another on a cell phone has led to legal restrictions and proposals to require drivers to use hands-free phones.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - We have much to learn from bad bugs, according to Gilbert Waldbauer, whose book "Insights From Insects: What Bad Bugs Can Teach Us" was published today (Prometheus Books).

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Are soy products healthy additions to a person's diet, safe alternatives to hormone-replacement therapy or cancer-causing agents? The answer, according to University of Illinois food science and human nutrition professor William Helferich, is, "It depends."

CHAMPAIGN, lll. - Sulfolobus islandicus, a microbe that can live in boiling acid, is offering up its secrets to researchers hardy enough to capture it from the volcanic hot springs where it thrives. In a new study, researchers report that populations of S. islandicus are more diverse than previously thought, and that their diversity is driven largely by geographic isolation.