Green chemistry: preventive healthcare for the environment
By Mariah Quintanilla We all know that bagel coated with sesame, poppy, onion, garlic, caraway and salt. Chemical engineer Nick Thornburg considers an ‘everything’ bagel a reasonable metaphor for an inefficient catalyst, or a compound that speeds up a chemical reaction. For those of us non-chemists, a longer explanation is required. The point of his […]
Sarah “Squirm” Sherman goes all out “sliming” stand-up comedy
By Lauren Ball The crowd erupted into unabashed roars of laughter as I made my way into the darkened back room of Chicago’s Hideout Inn on an otherwise mundane Thursday evening. The show had kicked off 30 minutes ago and the room was filled, from corner to beer-drenched corner, with young faces hoping to lose […]
President Barack Obama visits Chicago weeks before the election
By Christen Gall President Barack Obama visited Chicago over the Oct. 7-9 weekend in what could be his last visit before the general election on Nov. 8. After being greeted by Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama voted downtown, attended campaign events for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Illinois senate candidate Tammy Duckworth and spoke […]
Augusta Read Thomas’s Ear Taxi festival delivers a soaring ode to Chicago’s new music culture
By Grant Rindner Chicago is a music festival mecca with everyone covered, from hip-hop heads (AAHH Fest) to jazz aficionados (Hyde Park Jazz Festival) to EDM junkies (Spring Awakening). But vaunted composer Augusta Read Thomas wanted to highlight a vibrant, edgy music community that has yet to receive its due on that same scale – […]
Hiroshima exhibit documents the innocent victims of the atom bomb
By Wen-Yee Lee Three colorful origami cranes made by school girl Sadako Sasaki, a survivor of the U.S. strike on Hiroshima, sit on display for the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Exhibition in Chicago. She folded nearly 1,000 cranes as a traditional prayer for healing before she died of leukemia 10 years after the bomb strike. She […]
Bats master urban living but bring rabies
By Lakshmi Chandrasekaran Recent weeks have seen a spike in the number of rabies cases in bats in the Will, Cook and Dupage counties area (see chart below). As bats become more fearless and accustomed to noise, urban areas make good homes. Having bats in communities could be good for eliminating pests and pollinating flowers […]
Northwestern’s Sir J. Fraser Stoddart shares Nobel Prize for making molecular machines
by Hannah Moulthrop Sir J. Fraser Stoddart had been asleep for three hours early Wednesday when a phone call awakened him. The Northwestern University chemistry professor had been dealing with the aftermath of last week’s home break-in and his decimated backdoor. Stupefied, he heard Swedish-accented English and thought, is this a hoax? Stoddart could hardly […]
Chicago’s homeless fight a continuing war on rats
By Janice Cantieri / Photography by Lloyd DeGrane Jimmie Korosa awakened in the middle of the night with a foot-long rat clawing at his back. Korosa battles the rats every day. Like many people experiencing homelessness in Chicago, he camps in a tent in a vacant lot and faces constant exposure to the disease-carrying rodents. […]
Newly opened Tseng Kwong Chi retrospective highlights the power of the selfie
By Grant Rindner Though the term hovered decades away from its place in the lexicon of pop culture, the first retrospective of New York photographer and performance artist Tseng Kwong Chi elevates the selfie beyond something to kill time or send to friends in self-revealing five-second bursts. Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera, is […]
Can Columbus Day and Indigenous People’s Day co-exist?
By June Leffler [Package of Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline stories here] Chicago enters the debate over whether or not to celebrate Christopher Columbus, a man whose legacy has turned sour. Chicago designated Monday as Indigenous People’s Day, to be celebrated in conjunction with Columbus Day. Sharing the day might sound like a […]