Fifth graders at Field School in Park Ridge-Niles District 64 took a very close look at bugs in their science class on Oct. 26 through a powerful microscope made available by researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois.
Beckman Institute faculty members Todd J. Martinez and Mark E. Nelson have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The Beckman Institute is now home to a stunning new sculpture named "Flow" by Bathsheba Grossman of Santa Cruz, California. The sculpture is a bronze cast of a single ribbon floating in the outline of two interlocking toroids. It sits on a cylindrical metal base with a complete height of 82 inches.
Thanks to the Bugscope- housed in the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, students all over Illinois and almost anywhere else can peek at extreme close-up views of the insect world via their school computer labs - for free.
Thanks in large part to the efforts of five of its own researchers, the Beckman Institute will be headquarters to a new multi-university center aimed at moving forward the development of micro- and nano-electromechanical systems (MEMS and NEMS) for integration with larger systems.
John Rogers of the Beckman Institute's 3-D Micro and Nanosystems group has earned the honor of being named as a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Thomas Huang, Co-chair of the Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction research initiative, has been chosen for an IBM Faculty Award for 2006.
As reported in today's issue of Nature (Nov. 9), Beckman researcher and U. of I. chemistry professor Kenneth S. Suslick and graduate student Nathan C. Eddingsaas have used high-intensity ultrasound in liquid slurries of sugar and other organic crystals to create mechanoluminescence up to 1,000 times more intense than can be achieved by grinding.
The best at switching back and forth between tasks seem to be 20-somethings, based on research at Illinois. People ages 7 to 82 were asked to switch between two memory tasks in some simple numeric experiments. Both ends of the age spectrum did poorly, with young kids faring worst, says Art Kramer, Beckman researcher and U. of I. professor of psychology.
Beckman Institute researcher Monica Fabiani has been elected as President of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, considered one of the top professional organizations in the field of psychology.