Momentary increases in mothers’ sensitivity to their toddlers’ cues and emotional needs may boost young children’s focused attention on tasks and positive engagement with their mother while lowering the children’s expressions of negative emotions, a new study found. Led by human and community development professor Nancy McElwain and doctoral student Xi Chen, the new study of mothers and their toddlers was published recently in the Journal of Family Psychology.

The Biophotonics Imaging Lab, led by Stephen Boppart, has recently published papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in Precision Oncology that use label-free microscopic techniques to visualize extracellular vesicles, which are associated with cancer.

A study conducted by the Adult Learning Lab looked at how the framing of a health message evoked an emotional response in adults, and how that response influenced their perceived effectiveness of the message. The study was published in Experimental Aging Research.

Researchers in the Cognition and Brain Lab, led by Kara Federmeier, have recently published a paper in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience that investigates how predicting during sentence comprehension affects memory. This study demonstrates that what you predict can affect what you later remember. The study can have potential applications in learning outcomes.

By adding infrared capability to the ubiquitous, standard optical microscope, Illinois researchers at the hope to bring cancer diagnosis into the digital era. Led by Rohit Bhargava, a professor of bioengineering and the director of the Cancer Center, the researchers created digital biopsies that closely correlated with traditional pathology techniques and also outperformed state-of-the-art infrared microscopes.

The Chan group has recently developed a new probe to detect the activity of Cyclooxygenase-2, an enzyme that plays a major role in driving the progression of cancer. The researchers hope that this probe can have potential applications in cancer therapy.

Beckman scientists have simulated every atom of a light-harvesting structure in a photosynthetic bacterium that generates energy for the organism. The work is a major step toward understanding how some biological structures convert sunlight into chemical energy, a biological innovation that is essential to life. Much of the work was conducted at the Beckman Institute with members of the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group.

A recent study published in the Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society showed that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, pansexual, asexual, and/or nonbinary (LGBTQPAN) women and gender minorities experience harassment more than cisgender, straight women.