university of illinois at urbana champaign

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) For the average college basketball fan looking for an edge in a March Madness office pool, a University of Illinois expert in statistics and data analysis has some advice on how to pick winners: After the Sweet Sixteen round of play, ignore a team's seeding, which is a statistically insignificant predictor of a team's chances of winning.

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) A new study analyzing the impact of hand-held cell phone legislation on driving safety concludes that usage-ban laws had more of an impact in densely populated urban areas with a higher number of licensed drivers than in rural areas where there are fewer licensed drivers, according to a University of Illinois researcher.

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) In the battle against bacteria, researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a powerful new weapon -- an enhanced photocatalytic disinfection process that uses visible light to destroy harmful bacteria and viruses, even in the dark.

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Researchers report that Helicobacter pylori, the only bacterium known to survive in the harsh environment of the human stomach, directly activates an enzyme in host cells that has been associated with several types of cancer, including gastric cancer.

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Scientists have designed a synthetic protein that is both a structural model and a functional model of a native protein, nitric-oxide reductase.

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Two new studies reveal in unprecedented detail how the ribosome interacts with other molecules to assemble new proteins and guide them toward their destination in biological cells.

The studies used molecular dynamics flexible fitting to examine the interaction of the ribosome with two prominent molecular partners.

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) In a new study, researchers report that a class of heart medications called beta-blockers can have a helpful, or harmful, effect on the heart, depending on their molecular activity.

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) A new statistical technique developed by researchers at the University of Illinois allows scientists to scan a genome for specific gene-regulatory regions without requiring prior knowledge of the relevant transcription factors.

The technique has been experimentally validated in both the mouse genome and the fruit fly genome.

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Using a wet ethanol production method that begins by soaking corn kernels rather than grinding them, results in more gallons of ethanol and more usable co-products, giving ethanol producers a bigger bang for their buck -- by about 20 percent.

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Researchers report that a single-stranded DNA-binding protein, once thought to be a static player among the many molecules that interact with DNA, actually moves back and forth along single-stranded DNA, gradually allowing other proteins to repair, recombine or replicate the strands.