[ ] Life is a game. From the moment sperm fertilizes egg, you are either winning or losing. Using game theory--the study of competition and conflict--researchers can quantify the…
[ ] The University of Illinois has been awarded a 3-year, $5 million grant from the DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy as part of its OPEN 2015 funding initiative (ARPA-E…
[ ] Once male prairie voles have found a mate, what makes some stay at home, while others stray? The latest insight in a canonical scientific saga of genes, brain, social behavior,…
[ ] Agricultural innovation is needed now — not later — to avoid food shortages in a world with an ever-changing climate and a growing population. That’s the message University of…
[ ] Six researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), including William…
[ ] Despite government regulations, ground-level ozone – an odorless gas that forms as polluting nitrogen oxides drift in sunlight across the countryside – continues to threaten crop…
[ ] Any expectant mother will tell you that she wants her baby's organs to develop properly in the womb. What she may not realize, however, is that a child's internal organs continue…
[ ] By studying the behavior of living cells and combining them with synthetic tissue, researchers are creating “biological machines” to deliver drugs more effectively, function as…
[ ] Bacteria have many methods of adapting to resist antibiotics, but a new class of spiral polypeptides developed at the University of Illinois targets one thing no bacterium can…
[ ] Even as larvae, honey bees are tuned in to the social culture of the hive, becoming more or less aggressive depending on who raises them, researchers report in the journal…
[ ] The Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology’s recent symposium, "Looking in the right direction: Carl Woese and the New Biology," was conceived as a way to celebrate the…
[ ] For years genome-mapping technology has understood DNA as a linear code, but that’s not how it exists in the cell: it’s tangled up in 3D inside the nucleus, with higher- and lower…
[ ] Life is quirky. Although the molecules that make up all living things obey physical and chemical laws, they do so with a puzzling twist. How did the distinctive molecular features…
[ ] It’s not headline news that our brains are the seat of our thoughts and feelings. The brain is a body’s decision-maker, the pilot of its actions and the engineer that keeps all…
[ ] A new analysis supports the hypothesis that viruses are living entities that share a long evolutionary history with cells, researchers report. The study offers the first reliable…
[ ] Whether you have taken a side or a backseat in the discussion, the “food versus fuel” debate affects us all. Some say growing more biofuel crops today will decrease greenhouse gas…
[ ] It took two postdoctoral researchers, a lab technician, four undergraduates and their faculty advisors only four years – a blink of an eye in pharmaceutical terms – to scour a…
[ ] Natural selection is a race to reproduce, a competition between individuals with varying traits that helps direct the evolution of a species. As scientists begin to explore the…
[ ] Tumors are notoriously difficult to study in their natural habitat – body tissues – but a new synthetic tissue environment may give cancer researchers the next-best look at tumor…
[ ] In August 2015, three children in three separate northern Indiana counties were sickened by Escherichia coli O157:H7, and one of them died. Bacterial outbreaks like these send…