CPSC

In a world where increasing demands for food security and energy strain existing resources, scientists are looking for new ways to maximize both. One potential option, agrivoltaics, integrates solar photovoltaics with crops. A new study examines the agricultural and economic trade-offs that come with installing solar arrays on working farms across the Midwest.

Few pests eat away at farm profitability as much as soybean cyst nematode (SCN). Causing at least $1.5 billion in yield losses annually, it’s soybean’s single biggest threat. Unfortunately, soybean’s most effective tool, genetic resistance, is starting to fail. 

Researchers at Tezpur University in Assam, India, working with scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Plants may look inert and harmless, but, at any given moment, they’re waging chemical warfare against attackers, preparing tissues to withstand freezing temperatures, or synthesizing compounds that become medicines for humans. These leafy biochemists produce over a million chemicals, or metabolites, to help them survive their rooted existence. 

A lot has changed on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus since its founding in 1867, but a storied plot of land near the south quad has been preserved nearly intact for a century and a half.

Scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign can now differentiate between human-derived and hydrological contributions of riverine nitrogen pollution in the Upper Mississippi River Basin.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign corn breeders know profitability is about more than yield.

Bathed in an otherworldly purple glow, James Santiago points to a curled leaf at the base of a spinach plant. “This is an issue we saw all the time at the vertical farm where I worked in Virginia. We don't know exactly what's going on, but I think it has something to do with water stress, which is weird because the plants are growing in water.”

The energy that plants capture from sunlight through photosynthesis provides the source of nearly all of humanity’s food. Yet the process of photosynthesis has inefficiencies that limit crop productivity, especially in a rapidly changing world. A new review by University of Illinois scientists and collaborators reflects on how improving photosynthesis can bring us closer to food security.

Open-access biological databases have long served as pillars for life science research, providing freely accessible data that drive discovery across fields like genetics, ecology, and neuroscience.