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THE DAILY ILLINI
MONDAY October 14, 2013
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The independent student newspaper at the University of Illinois since 1871
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Vol. 143 Issue 28
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Murals encourage pollution awareness BY CLAIRE HETTINGER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Though the University is located inland, its only waterway, Boneyard Creek, eventually drains to the Gulf of Mexico along with any pollution that may be deposited. University Facilities and Services is coordinating a project featuring storm drain murals to encourage pollution awareness. The project, which features seven local artists and five University students, began as a requirement of the University’s Municipal Separate Storm Sewer permit from the Illinois EPA. This permit allows the University to direct storm water into receiving streams. Eliana Brown , the coordinator of special programs for Facilities and Services, said her department is responsible for organizing this public awareness project, focusing on pollution of waterways. Brown said this year her boss challenged her to do something that was more engaging for the public. She said that’s when she found that Columbia, Miss., had done a successful storm drain mural project and decided the University should give it a try. “Our hope for the project is that campus and our community will understand that they have
an impact downstream and that even though we are inland we are connected via our land and our storm drains to our waterways and on out to the oceans,” Brown said. Kristin Rose, one of the mural artists and a senior at the University majoring in art, said she wanted to join the project to support its cause and found it to be a good way to publicly display artwork. She said her mural, located in Meadowbrook Park, 2808 S. Race St., Urbana, is right next to a stream fed by storm water. “The source of that stream that is under the bridge is storm water and that water creates a habitat for plants and animals and things. So I decided to pick various native plants to put in each color block because I thought that would show that these plants are here, this water supports them, so you should keep it clean,” Rose said. She said she wanted her to draw attention to her mural by making it bright and colorful, and she also ensured it was kidfriendly because it is in a park. Another of the mural artists, George Hwang, a freshman in Engineering, said he found out about the project through a Mechanical Engineering Facebook page and applied right away.
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an inside look at Molly Malec’s mural and the project that brought it to life, visit DailyIllini.com Though he said he does not think he was the target audience for the project, he is glad he found the project. “Everything’s so fl at here I didn’t think about (pollution) at all but then the person who hired me was telling me about when you dump around here it actually goes to five different heads to five different rivers,” Hwang said. When he was deciding his mural’s theme, it seemed most important to catch people’s attention so they would look at it. He said he thought the best way to portray his message would be to make it “really cute.” “I thought OK, I’ll draw a picture of my cat, and then I thought they want to promote awareness of rivers, drains and all of that. So then I drew a cat fi shing,” Hwang said of his mural, which can be found between Mathews and Goodwin avenues in Urbana. Brown said the artists were given a link to a TED Talk explaining the stream pollution problem, followed by a local explanation of this problem to
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Molly Malec, senior in Media, paints the sidewalk on Mathews Avenue near the Engineering Quad on Sunday. Murals across campus encourage pollution awareness. guide them in designing their murals. “Then the artists came up with their designs, and we talked about it,” Brown said. “It really was a conversation, but it’s the artists’ creations.”
The murals were created with marine paint that is not a harm to the environment and will be covered with a clear sealant. They are expected to last between three to five years.
“I couldn’t be more proud of them,” Brown said. “Their artwork is simply breathtaking and amazing.”
Claire can be reached at hettngr2@dailyillini.com.
University professors contribute to Nobel Prize-winning research
Country singers “cruise” into their audiences’ hearts
Professors performed experiments to confirm existence of Higgs boson BY ANGELICA LAVITO CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Three University professors saw their research validated when the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs for their theory of the Higgs boson particle. Mark Neubauer, Steven Errede and Tony Liss, all professors of physics, participated in experiments that confi rmed the existence of the Higgs boson, a particle essential to understanding how matter gets its mass. “For us it was very much a validation of all the efforts we’ve put in,” Neubauer said. “Not only did we analyze the data, which we did here at the University of Illinois, but we also contributed strongly to building parts of the detector, and, also, we end-processed the data.” The professors participated in the ATLAS project, which was one of two working to locate the Higgs boson at CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Errede began his work with ATLAS in 1994 when he and his wife helped build a major portion of the Large Hadron Collider, which was used to conduct the experiment. The Large Hadron Collider accelerates protons, collides them together and creates foreign particles, Neubauer said. The ATLAS detector collects data from the collisions. Prior to the Large Hadron Collider’s activation in September 2008, researchers believed they had seen every particle existent, except for one — the Higgs boson. Englert and Higgs theorized about the particle’s existence in 1964, and more theories appeared until the discovery of the Higgs boson last year. “(The theories are) all descriptions of what theoretical physicists think could’ve happened,” Errede said. “But nature did what she did, and it’s up to us to figure out what the choice was. Some of them to me were very appealing, so it was rather a shock to discover that of all these possibilities, nature
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BRENTON TSE THE DAILY ILLINI
Florida Georgia Line performs at the State Farm Center on Sunday. The country duo has recently gained popularity after their song “Cruise” became a 2013 summer hit.
Art depicting UI researchers’ work on display at Midway BY EDWARD GATHERCOAL CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Brightly colored pictures depicting a wide array of scientific research projects now cover the walls of Concourse A at Chicago Midway International Airport, allowing passengers to experience the “Art of Science: Images from the Institute for Genomic Biology” expose. It will be on display until Spring 2014. The exhibit contains images that exemplify breakthrough research over a variety of scientific fields such as the environment, medicine and energy, demonstrating the diverse work done at the University’s Institute for Genomic Biology. “We are a melting pot of science,” said Kathryn Coulter,
multimedia design specialist and managing artist for the exhibition. The exhibit has 12 pictures and two banners that display enlarged and enhanced microscopic images that researchers were able to capture using state-of-the-art equipment provided by the institute. The aim of this presentation is to spark a scientific interest in the general community. “I think a lot of people are used to experiencing nature on their scale by looking at trees and plants and mountains, and these are beautiful things,” said Glenn Fried, director of core facilities at the institute. “But the reality is that nature is beautiful from a small scale to a planetary
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PHOTO COURTESY OF INSTITUTE OF GENOMIC BIOLOGY
Mitochondria of human colorectal cancer cells HCT116 prepared by Vladimir Kolossov and Jessica Beaudoin. It is one of 12 pieces displayed at Midway International Airport in Chicago. scale. And so you’re experiencing nature on a different level.” One of the projects featured in the exhibit was worked on by Vladimir Kolossov, visiting assistant professor, and Jessica Beaudoin, senior in ACES. Their image portrays the structure of mitochondria in colon cancer cells, or HCT116. Beaudoin explained that to show the mitochondrial struc-
ture, they made “a genetically encoded biosensor” that lights up the cellular structure. “When we excite them with the correct wavelength of UV light, (then) we can use the sensors to monitor intercellular signaling and responses to different reduction and oxidation,” Beaudoin explained.
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had selected what was proposed way back in 1964.” Errede and Neubauer agree that the discovery was exciting and were able to share the excitement with University students. To facilitate the task of analyzing data, a large computing center for ATLAS was established at the University, allowing data from the discovery to flow through the University. Physicists from all over the world come to use the computers at the University to analyze the data, Neubauer said. “The Higgs discovery, in a lot of ways, was a culmination of all the work we had put in to build components of the detector, to build systems to monitor the quality of the data, to process the data at our computer site here at Illinois and also to analyze the data by our students,” he said. Although Neubauer said it was a massive undertaking to contribute to the Higgs boson discovery, he and Errede are eager to see what advances in physics the discovery could lead to. The Large Hadron Collider was shut off following last year’s discovery and will remain off until 2015 after it undergoes improvements. Once it is on again, Neubauer said they hope to continue research to determine if the Higgs boson they detected is really the particle the theory describes, look for additional Higgs bosons and look for other signs of new physics that may be revolutionary. “We could be producing dark matter in our experiments, we could be producing extra dimensions, black hole production,” Neubauer said. “Basically, searching for new phenomena.”
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Angelica can be reached at lavito2@dailyillini.com.
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0RUH RQOLQH For a video summary of this story detailing the professors’ research that helped win the Nobel Prize, visit DailyIllini.com.
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