Ballooning state and federal incarceration is problematic and costly for many reasons, but one ever-increasing complication is the fact that our prison population is aging. According to the Census Bureau, from 1991 to 2021, the percentage of people 55 years or older in our nation’s prisons swelled from 3% to 15%. And more than 30% of people serving life sentences are at least 55 years old. Aging in prison can be dangerous. It is certainly costly. And data show that it cannot be justified by...

Bruce Tomblin, PhD Professor Emeritus, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders Language is often viewed as one of the signal attributes of humans. It is a universal property of humans that is acquired easily during early childhood with no formal instruction. During this time some children are more adept at language learning than others. These individual differences in language development have the potential of affecting children’s well-being. This talk will provide an overview of a...

More info to come, but wanted to let you know that Fraud Alerts for Seniors, Sally Leme, will present Thursday, May 16, 11 a.m. at 2520-D University Capitol Center (UCC) and via Zoom

Leslie uses the social and cultural history of Civil War medicine and science to probe the question of how and why anti-Black racism survived the destruction of slavery. Leslie's talk will describe how white Northerners—the U.S. Sanitary Commission and Army medical personnel—conducted wartime research aimed at proving Black medical and biological inferiority. She argues that this research not only led to the mistreatment of Black soldiers and civilians, it also promoted the notion of white...

As Iowa entered the 1960s, it faced issues that reflected the transition from an agricultural, rural state to one that had become majority urban with consequent tensions between its urban and rural communities—tensions that continue to this day. At the same time, Iowa’s food-based economy seemed increasingly out of sync with a national economy driven proportionately less by the consumption of food and more by growing consumer demand for homes, cars, televisions, hi-fis, and clothes—items that...

The immune system normally detects and destroys bacteria and cells infected with viruses. However, cancer cells are able to avoid destruction by the immune system. Basic research exploring how cancer cells and the immune system interact has led to the development of new drugs and treatment modalities that use the power of the immune system to treat cancer. Dr. Weiner will review the successes, challenges, and opportunities related to using the immune system to treat cancer. George Weiner is C...

What happens when a mother and daughter with different political concerns discuss issues of race in America? In 2015 on a visit home to Alabama, Patricia Foster and her mother argue over the riots in Ferguson, Missouri. This encounter becomes the catalyst for Foster’s visit to Africatown in Plateau, Alabama (40 miles from her hometown), where the last American slave ship, the Clotilda, arrived in 1860 after the U.S. had abolished the international slave trade in 1808.  What Foster discovers...

  Our Medical System Is Frayed: Why Did Humpty Dumpty Fall Off The Wall? Victoria Sharp, M.D., M.B.A. Professor Emeritus, Department of Urology Acting Chief of Staff, Iowa City VA Healthcare System Living in the United States, great health care is something we all expect to be available and reliable. Busy in our lives focusing on what is important to us and what we are good at, in general, you wouldn’t think we would need to do much more than eat healthy, exercise, drink alcohol in...

All multicellular organisms use “innate immune” receptors to detect and mobilize defensive responses to invading microbes. This includes proteins recognizing lipopolysaccharides (LPS) of Gram-negative bacteria. LPS-recognizing defense systems have been characterized in both humans and horseshoe crabs that have inhabited the Earth for 300+ million years. The ability of horseshoe crab LPS-binding protein to detect minuscule amounts of LPS has prompted pharmaceutical development of the horseshoe...

When you reach for your smartphone, is your hand reaching for it, or is the device now reaching for your hand, with its alerts, beeps, vibrations, and suddenly glowing screen? Does your hand want it, or does it want your hand? In this talk, I want to think about Walt Whitman’s most intimate passages, with his claims of a sentient physical book (codex) in mind—a kind of proto-smartphone—and see how his words work to evoke, to enact, the physical interaction between a living reader and a book...

In popular culture "time management" means planning every minute, being efficient, and getting everything done. It's something you need for your career, not your life. This time management does not fit with anyone's vision of "retirement." But there is another, more useful, more accurate version of time management: Time is all we have. We want to use our time to create a life worth living. To do that, we need to decide what to do, plan (enough) to make those things happen, and do them with...