Dr. Charles Macal shares how his work has helped predict the spread of COVID, and how modeling is an important tool for stopping future pandemics. COVID-19 has been dominating our lives and the news for more than a year now. Behind those news stories were scientists from a wide variety of fields working together to understand the virus, how it spread, and how best to beat it. Continue reading “Modeling Chicago for the COVID-19 Pandemic”
Air quality is an immensely important environmental issue all over the planet. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, air pollutant emissions in the atmosphere have been increasing, causing air quality to worsen. Recently, sustained efforts to improve air quality have successfully decreased air pollutant emissions across the United States, however, many urban areas still struggle to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air quality standards.
Continue reading “Every Breath You Take: Air Quality in Chicago”
Urban ecosystems were created by people, for people, but that doesn’t mean animals haven’t evolved to survive or even thrive within modern cities. Dr. Seth Magle and Dr. Maureen Murray highlight the importance of understanding human-wildlife interactions and the incredible research done by the Urban Wildlife Institute at Lincoln Park Zoo.
The survival of all forms of Life on Earth through geological time has depended on controlling mineral growth within the environments they inhabit. This process, called biomineralization, has been an essential unavoidable, and ubiquitously distributed force of nature that has caused essential strategic benefits (like forming bones for muscle attachment), as well as profound practical problems and impediments (such as the growth of kidney stones).
Continue reading “Biomineralization: Life Harnessing Mineral Growth Over Four Billion Years”
About 12,000 years ago, early humans began directly shaping nature through selective breeding of plants and animals. This moment in time is called the Agricultural Revolution. What humans eat today, in Chicago and around the globe, is a direct result of the advances made thousands of years before any of us were ever born. But the truth is that the Agricultural Revolution never stopped. In some ways, it’s just begun… Continue reading “Engineering Plants: The 12,000 Year Plan”
This summer, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed a comprehensive program, called SHIELD, to mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. One key to the program is a new, highly-specific test for SARS-CoV-2. Now, with a game-changing new testing procedure available, the University of Illinois System has created a team called SHIELD Illinois to deploy the program across the state. Join University of Illinois leaders to learn how SHIELD works, how it makes testing more effective, and ultimately how the program will be rolled out beyond the University’s campus.
