New Atlas, March 24, 2020 - Scrunching graphene up into a wrinkled mess rather than a neat, flat sheet is a technique being explored by researchers pursuing a number of new technologies. These have included using crumpled balls as components for better batteries, combining them with rubber to form artificial muscles, or bunching crumpled graphene balls together for next-generation energy storage. What excites the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign team is crumpled graphene’s potential in biosensing applications where it could spot disease when other diagnostic tools cannot. The scientists see particular promise when it comes to finding subtle biomarkers for cancer that can hide in nucleic acids like DNA and RNA, as our current methods of detecting them have plenty of room for improvement.
COVID-19 MEASURES
SWHR 30th Aniversary Awards Dinner
NSP faculty Monica Fabiani and Gabriele Gratton
Brain Imaging and Tinnitus: International Interdisciplinary Conference
Brain Awareness Day
Extracellular Vesicle Biology and Technology Workshop
The Wildlife Society, March 20, 2020: "We always wanted to know, how does a host start to recognize a new threat?” said Matt Louder, lead author of the study published in Scientific Reports, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois. Louder, who is now an ecologist at the environmental consulting firm H.T. Harvey and Associates, said they already knew some red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) don’t attack the cowbirds when they are unfamiliar because they don’t share the same habitat or geographic area.
More Department News
- A team led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering and Carle Health has produced a prototype emergency ventilator to help address the expected surge in the need for respiratory care associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Find out more about the prototype at http://rapidvent.grainger.illinois.edu. “Our team is living the Apollo 13 movie,” said William King, the overall project leader. “We have dropped everything else to work around the clock to help respond to the COVID-19 crisis.” King is a Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering who holds appointments in The Grainger College of Engineering and the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. “We have a team of brilliant and dedicated people that made something that actually works in less than one week. It’s very inspiring. We hope that we can engage even more people to work on the global response to COVID-19 as we continue to develop the prototype.” The Illinois RapidVent, as the emergency ventilator is known, would plug into the oxygen source available in most hospital rooms or could plug into a tank of oxygen. The prototype has run for more than 75 hours, which is more than 125,000 breathing cycles. Over this time, the device delivered the amount of oxygen necessary and the pressure that patients would need when they are unable to breathe well enough on their own. So far, focused testing in the laboratory shows equivalent performance to commercial products—which are in very short supply.
- URBANA, Ill. – You know that feeling in your gut? We think of it as an innate intuition that sparks deep in the belly and helps guide our actions, if we let it. It’s also a metaphor for what scientists call the “gut-brain axis,” a biological reality in which the gut and its microbial inhabitants send signals to the brain, and vice versa.
- CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers used accelerometers to measure daily physical activity in 30 stroke survivors for a week, assessing how much the participants moved and how well they performed routine physical tasks. The study revealed that stroke survivors who engaged in a lot of light physical activity – taking leisurely walks or attending to nonstrenuous household chores, for example – also reported fewer physical limitations than their more sedentary peers. The researchers describe their findings in the American Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. “Stroke is a major cause of disability in older adults,” said Neha Gothe, a professor of kinesiology and community health at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who led the research. “We know that physical activity can improve how well people survive a stroke and recover after the fact. But almost no research has looked at how physical activity of different intensities affects physical function among stroke survivors.”
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Faculty Spotlight
How would you describe your background? (I.E. where you are from? How did you first get interested in your area of research? Etc.) At the end of high school, I was trying to choose between psychology and chemistry. What convinced me to go to psychology was my aunt, who was a neurologist. I was having conversations with her and realized I really liked it. I started psychology as an undergraduate with an interest in physiology. From the get-go I started doing what was then called biopsychology, now it’s called cognitive neuroscience. At the end of my undergraduate studies, I applied for grad school at UIUC and came here as a graduate student. My graduate education is from Illinois. Then I left for 10 years. I had a position as a research scientist at New York State Psychiatric Institute for four years, then I got a tenure track position at the University of Missouri, in Columbia. Illinois out of the blue called me asking whether I would be interested in coming back as faculty, so I came back here in 2001.
Alumni Spotlight
Career Development What field in Neuroscience did you study? What about the research process did you enjoy? Did you prefer gathering the data, brainstorming its meaning, the writing process, defending your research, presenting your research, etc. I studied circadian rhythms and the biological clock in the hypothalamus in the lab of Dr. Martha Gillette. We used a slice-in-a-dish model and I conducted electrophysiology in rat brain slices. I used this method to examine the signal transduction pathway of the hormone melatonin as it influenced the biological clock. I always enjoyed the actual experiments and the hands-on experience of working in the lab. As far as reporting results, I was more interested in the big picture and eventual clinical application to human medicine. I just never could get that excited about experimental results in my lab work (which was an indicator I was not in exactly the right career for me). I did enjoy synthesizing my work and giving presentations – eventually. As a grad student that first conference presentation was pretty scary. I also remember making all my slides by hand with CorelDRAW and Adobe Photoshop, before PowerPoint was standard.