Related News

Talking tomatoes: How their communication is influenced by enemies and friends

Esther Ngumbi and Erinn Dady in greenhouse
Plants produce a range of chemicals known as volatile organic compounds that influence their interactions with the world around them. In a new study, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign investigated how the type and amount of these VOCs change based on different features of...

Windows to the Deep Past

A cross section of a coal ball with the collection of others behind it.
 Paleobotanists at the University of Illinois understand one thing better than perhaps anyone in the world: Studying coal balls is a long-term commitment. The late plant biologist Tom Phillips began hauling the prehistoric objects out of the ground more than a half-century ago and filled a...

The Key to Species Diversity May Be in Their Similarities

graphic of plants in cog wheels
More than four decades ago, field ecologists set out to quantify the diversity of trees on a forested plot on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, one of the most intensively studied tracts of forest on the planet. They began counting every tree with a trunk wider than a centimeter.They identified the...

Illinois Students Awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

alma mater
Launched in 1952 shortly after Congress established NSF, the Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) program represents the nation's oldest continuous investment in the scientific workforce. The program recruits high-potential, early-career researchers and supports their graduate training in science,...

Following in the footsteps of early 20th century naturalist Elizabeth Kerr

Juliana Soto, with a sooty ant tanager, Habia gutturalis
 I am walking in a forest and listening to a concert of birdsong at dawn. I pick one song out of the chorus – a fast chatter full of melodious whistles – the sound of the sooty ant tanager.“Today, we will probably get to know this bird up close,” I think. My colleagues and I set up and...

Illinois Storytellers - Nariah Romero-Rudy

Nariah Romero-Rud
The Illinois Commitment scholarship program made an Illinois education possible for Nariah Romero-Rudy (LAS ’23). In this essay, she shares the inspiration behind her dream of becoming a genetic counselor. The Illinois Storytellers series brings you first-person pieces from distinctive Illinois...