The Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment has awarded $30,000 in seed funding to Andrew Hultgren, assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, and others for an interdisciplinary proposal examining the economic and human health effects of exposure to wildfire smoke on a broad scale. The project aims to inform policy related to climate change.

Breakfast may be the most important meal of the day. But it was beyond important for Henry Leung, PHD ’75 ACES, and Cecilia Tsun-Tai Jen Leung, MS ’71 ACES, PHD ’74 ACES, back when they were international graduate students—he from Hong Kong, and she from Taiwan.

ONE MINUTE, wheelchair racer Susannah Scaroni, ’14 ACES, MS ’22 ACES, was pushing through a normal long training session, heading east on Windsor Road not far from campus. The next, she was moving ahead much more quickly than she expected.

It was early morning on Sept. 16, 2021. A month before, Scaroni had been in Tokyo for the Paralympics, where she won a gold medal in the 5,000 meters and a bronze medal in the 800 meters.

Following decades of decline, even fewer birds will darken North American skies by the end of the century, according to a new analysis by scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

When scientists transplanted the gut microbes of aged mice into young “germ-free” mice — raised to have no gut microbes of their own — the recipient mice experienced an increase in inflammation that parallels inflammatory processes associated with aging in humans. Young germ-free mice transplanted with microbes from other young mice had no such increase. 

The findings suggest that changes to the gut microbiome play a role in the systemwide inflammation that often occurs with aging, the researchers said.