Spiderman, Man of Steel, The Matrix, Game of Thrones, and even Boardwalk Empire wouldn’t be the same without green-screen technology. Most moviegoers recognize the signature solid green backdrops in pre-production still images and understand that the final product will have fantastic backgrounds, sizeable crowds, or special effects in the green-screen’s space. But a new paper … Read more
A team of University of Illinois researchers at the Micro + Nanotechnology Lab recently applied new theoretical physics concepts to enhance the performance of a well-established semiconductor laser technology. In a paper published in Optica, Kent Choquette, a professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE), and his group reported parity-time (PT) symmetry breaking in an … Read more
The movement of atoms in solids controls everything. In order to develop new materials, material engineers need to be able to predict how fast impurity atoms diffuse, or spread, in a crystal over a range of temperatures. Using new computational techniques, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have constructed the first exact model … Read more
The NCAA men’s basketball tournament – commonly known as March Madness – begins March 14. Millions of college basketball enthusiasts will be filling out their brackets, hoping to predict the outcome of all the games. Computer science professor Sheldon H. Jacobson discusses patterns he’s observed in the tournament and how data analytics can provide guidance … Read more
Timing the harvest and transport of highly perishable, hand-picked crops such as strawberries so these delicate products reach consumers at peak flavor and freshness is an intricate dance that partners Mother Nature with manual labor. However, many of the “smart farming” techniques and technologies that help growers harvest more of what they sow faster and … Read more
A semiautonomous robot may soon be roaming agricultural fields gathering and transmitting real-time data about the growth and development of crops, information that crop breeders – and eventually farmers – can use to identify the genetic traits in plants likely to produce the greatest yields. A team of scientists from the Carle R. Woese Institute … Read more
Researchers at the University of Illinois report they can alter blood cell development through the use of biomaterials designed to mimic characteristics of the bone marrow. The findings, reported in the journal Science Advances, are a first step toward developing more effective bone marrow treatments for diseases like leukemia and lymphoma. Blood cells flow throughout … Read more
By hijacking a cancer cell’s own metabolism, researchers have found a way to tag and target elusive cancers with small-molecule sugars. This opens treatment pathways for cancers that are not responsive to conventional targeted antibodies, such as triple-negative breast cancer. Led by Jianjun Cheng, a Hans Thurnauer Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University … Read more
Tiny carbon dots have, for the first time, been applied to intracellular imaging and tracking of drug delivery involving various optical and vibrational spectroscopic-based techniques such as fluorescence, Raman, and hyperspectral imaging. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated, for the first time, that photo luminescent carbon nanoparticles can exhibit reversible switching … Read more
I’ll bet you don’t have one of these at home. For the past several years, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been developing a class of walking “bio-bots” powered by muscle cells and controlled with electrical and optical pulses. Now, Rashid Bashir’s bioengineering research group is sharing the recipe for the current … Read more