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A group of students is gathered around a table in the basement of the Campus Instructional Facility at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, looking at boxes filled with beetles, walking sticks, spiders, dragonflies and other insects.

The students are searching for inspiration for what creatures might look like on a swampy alien planet. They are designing the characters and environment for a Concept Art for Video Games class offered through Illinois Informatics and taught by Michael Curtin, the innovation coordinator for campus information technology and a former video game industry artist.

Go Behind the Scenes with U. of I. Pollinatarium educator Lesley Deem and beekeeper Nathan Beach as they move honey bees from their glass-fronted summer observation hive to a warmer winter hive.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign political science students navigate ways to defuse and open dialogue in a polarized political environment as part of the Richard G. and Carole J. Cline Symposium “Bridging Political Differences in a Polarized World” held Oct. 24 at the Illini Union Ballroom.

I stand at the edge of an archaeological excavation, watching in disbelief as students dig up the remnants of a structure I helped build 22 years ago as an undergraduate student in an experimental archaeology course. This structure was modeled on one recovered from a true archaeological site I helped excavate in 1999 — a log-and-thatch dwelling dating back 900 years from a Mississippian mound site near present-day St. Louis. This site is associated with the nearby UNESCO World Heritage site known as Cahokia.

It’s a blazingly sunny September Saturday afternoon at Riggs Beer Company, a family-friendly brewery located on the edge of Urbana. It’s not surprising to see crowds of families basking in the dog days of summer with their food truck lunches and locally brewed pints of beer. Unexpected, however, are the patrons donning medieval and fantasy garb, accompanied by young children, some in princess dresses and others carrying around foam swords. 

These aspiring adventurers are here on a quest, recruited to take part in a training regimen to combat the incursion of invasive species from the Feywild, a magical plane that exists adjacent to our own that is full of weird and wonderful wildlife. 

As I scroll through another sheet of data, I know each entry represents the story of a high school athlete whose season — and, potentially, life — was altered due to a possible concussion. I am looking for trends and risk factors, with the goal of helping physicians and coaches better evaluate whether an athlete has sustained a concussion and when it is safe to resume activity.

I can barely hear Esther Ngumbi over the roar of greenhouse fans as she shows me around her rooftop laboratory. The benches are full of tomato plants, and the tomatoes don’t look good. Half of the plants are submerged in bins of water. Their leaves are yellow and withering. Some of the dying tomatoes have flowered. I see one or two baby tomatoes on a couple of spindly plants. 

This isn’t the only torture inflicted on the tomatoes. Someone has tied little baggies to their stems. Inside the bags, fat green caterpillars are chowing down on the tomato leaves.

All nine of the wheelchair racing athletes representing the U.S. at the 2024 Paralympics have a connection to Illinois. U. of I. head coach Adam Bleakney discusses his background, the competition and what he’s looking forward to at the Paris Games.

As the scorching May sun of Central Belize blazes down on us, temperatures soar to a staggering 106°F. Local farmers anxiously await the onset of the rainy season to sow their crops, but the much-needed first rain remains elusive. This property is owned by a community of Mennonites who live in the town of Outlook to the west. The maize fields lie empty except for us. We are the Valley of Peace Archaeology project team, named after a nearby village where our foremen and excavation assistants live. We are braving the extreme heat to conduct salvage excavations of 11 ancient Maya mounds.

Crowds of people bustle about at the Martinsville Agricultural Fairgrounds on a Monday afternoon with their eyes on the sky. The air ripples with excitement as we eagerly await our chance to witness the moon consuming the sun — a total solar eclipse!

Go Behind the Scenes with postdoctoral researcher Jordan Hartman as she travels to a cooperative prawn and rice farm in Southeast Vietnam to learn about sustainability and adaptation to climate change. Hartman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Illinois Natural History Survey at the U. of I.

On a scorching summer day, I’m at work in the heart of the arthropod containment laboratory of the Medical Entomology Program. I place my hands in the rubber gloves that reach into a sealed workspace called the glove box, swiftly maneuvering to grab fully engorged mosquitoes. These insects have just fed on a blood meal infected with live dengue virus. They are now resting calmly on a chilled Petri dish, thanks to the low temperatures provided by the ice below.

Emma Lundin, a graduate student in tourism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, discusses her research in a rainforest in Sri Lanka, exploring how to create sustainable nature-based tourist experiences by walking "with" the forest.

We adjust a lens, and a bright constellation swirls into view – points of colored light hung against a deep-hued backdrop. They are not stars, but extracellular vesicles: tiny packages of molecular cargo in nanosized lipid carriers, released by all cells in the body. We are launching a new project with the goal of not only visualizing EVs in living tissue, but also tracking their dynamics. We have been named 2023 Allen Distinguished Investigators by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation for this purpose.

The slabs of sandstone that make Altgeld Hall one of the most recognizable buildings on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus have been covered in scaffolding for months. But the results of the renovation work going on there are apparent, as the dark gray stone is restored to a pinkish hue. The work is part of a multiphase project that includes exterior and interior restoration of the building.

Shafts of sunlight are coming through the skylights of the Stock Pavilion on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus, illuminating swirls of dust stirred up as several people standing on the dirt floor uncoil ropes, pulling them taut and twirling them in circles like lassos. It looks like the setting for a rodeo, but this is a nautical environment.

“CETACEAN (The Whale),” the latest multimedia performance in “The Unreliable Bestiary,” tells stories about eco-anxiety and resilience in adjusting to changing conditions.

It’s one of the hottest days of the summer, but a dozen people have gathered with their water bottles, sun hats and gardening tools in front of Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They're starting early in the morning, before it gets even hotter, amid blooms of pink, purple, yellow, orange and white. They're clipping the spent flowers from zinnias and the dead leaves from day-lilies, weeding and watering.

I’m in a room with more than 100 police recruits and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. The future police officers are learning about the devastating consequences of criminal prosecutions gone wrong. These aren’t just abstract stories. More than a dozen exonerees are here to share their stories with the police recruits.

Trek through Colombia with graduate student Juliana Soto, who, with her all-female team of Colombian ornithologists, revisits landscapes to study and document the birds of the region. In preparing for the expedition, Soto discovered the work of naturalist Elizabeth Kerr, who in the early 20th century collected wild bird specimens in Colombia for the American Museum of Natural History.

Early on a sunny Sunday morning, the chimes tower in Altgeld Hall is filling up with people. Students climb the steep staircase to the tower, several of them carrying snacks. They are all chimes players who will perform for a recording of chimes music.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign staff and students took part in the participatory artwork “Blind Field Shuttle” by artist Carmen Papalia, which offers participants the opportunity to explore the world without sight.

Go Behind the Scenes with U. of I. Extension forestry and research specialist Christopher Evans, who leads a training program for landowners who want to learn how to maintain healthy forests.

Tyrone Phillips, an Illinois theatre program alumnus and the artistic director of Chicago’s Definition Theatre, returned to direct students in a play this spring.

Lexi Gomez is knee-deep in a pond when I first see her in the U. of I. Plant Biology Greenhouse and Conservatory. A fifth-year senior who will graduate this semester, Gomez dips a net in the dark water to clear the pond of debris fallen from the lush jungle of tropical plants that looms above. She attacks the work with gusto.

Most people don’t visit the health department to view student art, but here we are, in the busy main hall of the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District. We are wearing face masks, reading artist statements and reviewing more than a dozen visual and digital explorations of influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, COVID-19 and – the trickiest of all health topics – human behavior. Nurses and dental assistants whiz by with young patients. People walk by to pick up birth certificates. Two kids sit in a corner and play with one of the art pieces.

It’s obvious this isn’t just an art show. It’s an end-of-term presentation designed by students in my evolutionary immunology class for students in kindergarten through the eighth grade. These creative works are meant to show the youngsters how to prevent the spread of respiratory infections in the community. These kids are using the art exactly the way it was intended.

Three students gather around an old iron letterpress at the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab, preparing to make a print using 19th-century technology. The press requires all three students to operate it.

I'm in my little sister's room, where I've grabbed her Bop It! toy from her desk. I will use this toy to structure the dance I'm choreographing. I have my little black notebook and favorite black pen nearby. My phone leans against my computer, ready to record. I pull the Bop It! lever to start the game.

My alarm is going off as I quietly, yet eagerly, get out of bed at the dark and early time of 4 a.m.  Today, I get to do something that I love and that also benefits bird conservation.

I arrive just before dawn at the U. of I.’s Phillips Tract, a former farm that is now a 130-acre natural area just east of Urbana and is used for scientific research and student training. I unlock the gate, park and gather the supplies I keep on site. Then I wait for the volunteers to arrive. The team today is a dedicated mix of staff, graduate students and undergraduates – all of whom are committed to helping capture, band and monitor the birds that use this site.

Sitting at the long covered tables in the heart of Japan House, I close my eyes. All 18 of us do. We are students in the Japan House class Ikebana: The Art of Japanese Flower Arrangement. Professor Kimiko Gunji is introducing our sixth ikebana arrangement, and this is our first step. My socked feet glide on the smooth hardwood floor as I sit in silence and think. What kokoro – emotion, essence, idea – do I want to convey?

The first thing I notice when we step through white double doors of the growers’ house is that every one of the 1,200 or so chickens in this enormous room has stopped whatever it was doing to stare at us. A few of the birds step closer, peering at our legs as if they want to peck our shoes. But they don’t. They’re just curious. Chickens, I realize, are gawkers.

As we climb the mountain of stairs that leads to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and step inside, I’m struck by the scale and grandeur of what lies before me and the complexity, beauty and discourse it offers. I want to take in the entire museum, but I am most excited to see the stoneware jug that I first encountered while excavating in 2011. This jug is part of the museum’s “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina” exhibition.

We stand in the open fields of Spanish Lookout, a modernized Mennonite farming community in Central Belize, looking at what remains of ancestral Maya homes after years of plowing. White mounds, the remnants of these houses, pock the landscape as far as the eye can see, a stark reminder of what existed more than 1,000 years ago. The collapsed buildings look like smudges on an aerial photograph, but as archaeologists, we get to see them up close. With enough excavation and interpretation, we can eventually make sense of how these dwellings functioned in the deep human past.

The author and her colleagues search a South Texas scrubland for the federally endangered Zapata bladderpod, Physaria thamnophila. This rare endemic plant, a member of the mustard family, is named for the region and is found in only two counties in the United States.

When most people are just getting home from their workdays, I’m about to start mine. I am a researcher studying the breeding behavior of the Eastern whip-poor-will (Antrostomus vociferus), a cryptic bird that is primarily active after sunset as it forages on the wing for moths. So – for the summer, at least – I also am nocturnal.

Things have changed since I was last in Belize in 2018, when I excavated the ancestral Maya pilgrimage site Cara Blanca. Thousands of acres of jungle are gone, replaced by fields of corn and sugarcane. Hundreds of ancestral Maya mounds are now exposed in the treeless landscape, covered by soil that is currently plowed several times a year.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, I was awarded a three-year National Science Foundation grant to conduct a salvage archaeology project here in Belize. The goal is to collect as much information as possible before the mounds are plowed away.

The grills are already fired up as I approach the Meat Science Laboratory on the U. of I. campus. It’s midmorning on a spring day that’s chillier than it should be.

Well-worn charcoal and gas grills are stationed in a wide arc on a lawn flecked with violets. In front of each grill stand three students for whom eating burgers for breakfast is now commonplace.

Japan House offered a Japanese boatbuilding apprenticeship, where students worked with boatbuilding expert Douglas Brooks to build a traditional riverboat in six days.

Students in Fine and Applied Arts and informatics learned how to create an immersive environment and to build puzzles to challenge the players and reinforce the story.

Early November may not be an optimal time to visit a tallgrass prairie in central Illinois. But if you know what to look for, as my two guides do, it’s as good a time as any.

Despite recent heavy rains, the prairie looks as dry as a skull. Grass and flower stalks rattle in the cold breeze, and each plant appears to sport its own special array of desiccated seeds, leaves and flower heads. The ground is still damp but the tops of the plants are crispy.

I’m here with Fred Delcomyn and James Ellis, the authors of “A Backyard Prairie,” a book about Fred and Nancy Delcomyn’s personal project, a 3-acre swath of prairie that they began installing near their home in 2003 and have nurtured ever since.

It’s early morning, about 6 a.m. A light fog has settled over the marsh. I park my car, step out and double-check my backpack for all the necessary equipment before heading out. After a short walk on a narrow paved path, I veer into the unmarked marsh. I’m here to study how red-winged blackbirds respond to the vocalizations that signal nearby nest parasites called brown-headed cowbirds.

At first glance, Trelease Woods looks like any other central Illinois woodland. There’s a well-worn track inside its fenced eastern edge, and the forest floor is littered with twigs and branches. But as I walk along the path with my companions, I notice that some of the trees are bigger than any I’ve seen in this area.

It’s a sweltering summer afternoon. I’m pushing aside tree limbs and crunching leaves to get back to the trap that I baited two hours ago with dry ice to attract ticks. When I get closer, I can see a gossamer mist hovering over a bright white cloth in the dark underbrush. Dry ice “sublimates” in the open air, going from a solid to a gaseous state. It gives off a vapor of carbon dioxide gas that’s denser than the air, mimicking the breath of a tick host resting on the ground.

An hour before the sun goes down, my colleagues and I arrive at our site: a human-made pond in the middle of the forest. The high-pitched croaking of Cope's gray treefrogs greets us as we get out of our truck. Surrounded by trees and full of salamanders, these ponds are an essential water resource for our forest-dependent bats. We do a brief survey of the site, then set up our mist nets around the pond’s perimeter. We’re hoping to catch our target species – the Indiana bat, Myotis sodalis.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – A tough semester and an even tougher year have just ended. I need a break. I’m fully vaccinated and want to escape the yearlong lockdown. And I’m an entomologist. What do I do?

I grab my best friend, also an entomologist, and we hit the road, of course. This is the year of my people’s “Woodstock.”

The sun just dipped below the horizon and the warm early spring air mixes with the stone-chilled currents flowing out of the mine entrances. The nets are all hung and now we are just waiting for the bats to show up. This is my first mist-netting trip, but I have been warned this will not be a typical experience.

Earth Day has one science writer pondering how much research conducted at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has direct ecological implications.

I distinctly remember the first day I saw the images proving our hypothesis about the connection between a herpesvirus and urogenital cancer in wild California sea lions. Our research team was the first to use a revolutionary technique to probe preserved cancerous tissue from marine mammals as we looked for signals of specific viral genes.

And we found them: Wherever there was tumor, there also was a strong signal of multiple cancer-promoting viral genes, called oncogenes. There were no viral genes in the adjacent cancer-free tissue. This meant that the virus clearly played a role in cancer development and was not merely a bystander in the animals’ reproductive tracts.

HUNTING GOODENOUGH DAYS aptly describes what I am doing during the isolation of 2020. These words are surnames found among the 7,000 headstones that I have photographed during my travels to cemeteries seeking new names that are parts of speech – words that I can use to create poetry for my visual books that investigate language, history and life’s events.

My mask keeps my face warm as I make my way to the Wildlife Veterinary Epidemiology Laboratory this cold November morning. Campus is starting to empty out as students leave for the holidays. However, with cases of COVID-19 increasing again, many students may not return until next semester and many others will be isolating in their homes. Back in March, I worked remotely when the pandemic shut campus down, and since early summer, I have been working in person again. After the holidays pass, I hope we won’t have to give up our time in the laboratory to do virtual work alone.

It’s hot and my shirt is sticking to my back. I part scrubby marsh vegetation with one hand and shield my face with the other. Hiking along the margins of Illinois’ only open-water quaking bog, I’m carrying five liters of swamp water in bottles in my backpack, my samples sloshing with each step.

Collecting wetland water samples is far from glamorous. My feet are wet, my legs caked in mud, and I frequently swat at hordes of mosquitoes as I hike, sometimes with as much as 10 liters of water in my pack. I’m not interested in the water; rather, if all goes well, I will find my samples contain the DNA of mysterious marsh birds, called rails, that breed and migrate through Illinois wetlands.