Related News

Cosplaying for science

a tattooed woman handing a girl in a skirt seeds
  URBANA, Ill. – It’s a blazingly sunny September Saturday afternoon at Riggs Beer Company, a family-friendly brewery located on the edge of Urbana. It’s not surprising to see crowds of families basking in the dog days of summer with their food truck lunches and locally brewed pints...

NSF, international partners to invest nearly $10M in ASAP Global Center

A photo of a woman on the left and a man on the right
 The U.S. National Science Foundation and partner agencies in the U.S., Canada, Finland, Japan, the Republic of Korea (ROK), and the United Kingdom announced funding of new international centers of excellence in their Global Centers competition. One of the centers, the ...

CABBI team designs efficient bioenergy crops that need less water to grow

two men standing in front of plants.
Drought stress has long been a limiting factor for crop production around the world, a challenge exacerbated by climate change.For more than a century­, scientists have targeted a key plant trait known as water use efficiency (WUE) to help crops grow with less water and avoid suffering from drought...

Drowning tomatoes for science

A scientist studying a tomato plant that's in a plastic bag.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —  I can barely hear Esther Ngumbi over the roar of greenhouse fans as she shows me around her rooftop laboratory in Morrill Hall. The benches are full of tomato plants, and the tomatoes don’t look good. Half of the plants are submerged in bins of water. Their leaves are yellow...

Researchers reconstruct an evolutionary history of flowering plants

plant
Researchers at the University of Illinois have contributed to a large-scale international study that has reconstructed a comprehensive "tree of life" for flowering plants.  The study offers new light on the evolutionary history of angiosperms, which account for approximately 90 percent of all...

Faculty members receive named scholar and professorship positions

Alma Mater in front of Altgeld Hall
The College of LAS has honored 17 professors with named scholar and professorship positions in recognition of their contributions to research and education at the University of Illinois.The named positions include the Brad and Karen Smith Scholars, the Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (...

Study brings scientists a step closer to successfully growing plants in space

Ying standing in lab and Andrew sitting in office
New, highly stretchable sensors can monitor and transmit plant growth information without human intervention, report University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers in the journal Device.The polymer sensors are resilient to humidity and temperature, can stretch over 400 percent while remaining...