URBANA, Ill. – When a dead bat was found in a package of salad greens in 2017, the Florida story spurred product recalls and national media attention. The incident, assumed to be rare, was one of dozens of cases of consumers finding animals – live, dead, or severed – in fresh produce over the past 15 years. A University of Illinois study catalogues and analyzes these incidents as part of a larger effort towards greater food safety and quality improvements in the fresh produce industry.

URBANA, Ill. – Before gifting her farmland to the University of Illinois in the early 2000s, and long after she had moved from Illinois, Lora Sims recounted that she was once advised to sell off her Montgomery County land.

But Sims didn’t want to sell the farm that had been such an important part of her family. Lora’s mother, Adelaide “Addie” Colvin Sims, owned the land and then left it to Lora and her siblings. That decision has now positively impacted hundreds of University of Illinois students.

Growing up in Silicon Valley, Krti Tallam was steeped in a culture that equated success with personal wealth and getting ahead. But that didn’t sit right with her.

“As grateful as I was to grow up there, I was bombarded by a sense that you need to be in tech to be successful,” she says. “It bothered me that we have 7 billion people in the world and we’re teaching them to look out for themselves, not do anything for the planet.”

Champaign, Ill. –– For thousands of years, plants have produced food for humans, but with genetic tweaks, they can also manufacture proteins like Ebola vaccines, antibodies to combat a range of conditions, and now, cellulase that is used in food processing and to break down crop waste to create biofuel.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Human waste might be an unpleasant public health burden, but scientists at the University of Illinois see sanitation as a valuable facet of global ecosystems and an overlooked source of nutrients, organic material and water. Their research is reported in the journal Nature Sustainability.

Read more from the Illinois News Bureau. 

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – A new computer model incorporates how microscopic pores on leaves may open in response to light—an advance that could help scientists create virtual plants to predict how higher temperatures and rising levels of carbon dioxide will affect food crops, according to a study published in a special issue of the journal Photosynthesis Research today.

Read more at the RIPE website.

The Office of International Programs in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) has initiated the Global Food Security Fellows Program to support exceptional students who are interested in conducting food-related research in a developing country. The first cohort of Fellows included four ACES graduate students and three undergraduates. These Fellows will be sharing their experiences on the Voices of ACES blog.  

URBANA, Ill. – The College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois, along with a generous gift from the Roy J. Carver Charitable Trust and contributions from 17 other academic units at Illinois, are funding the purchase of a Bruker 9.4 Tesla preclinical animal MRI system.

URBANA, Ill. – When international aid organizations respond to hunger crises around the world, they rely on food security early warning and monitoring systems. However, assessments from those systems can lag months behind the actual situation on the ground.

More accurate and timely warnings could greatly improve the global response to food crisis and help alleviate acute problems, according to a team of agricultural economists at the University of Illinois, working in collaboration with the University of Texas, Austin.

URBANA, Ill. – Conflict over resource extraction is rampant in sub-Saharan Africa, with small-scale miners violently pitted against multinational mining corporations – and the state security forces that protect them – for access. Attempts to solve the problem by imposing Western environmental systems and regulations aren’t working. But it’s not for the reasons most experts might suspect, according to a new Illinois study.