University of Iowa chemists have revealed the chemistry behind how certain diseases, from anthrax to tuberculosis, replicate. The key lies in the function of a gene absent in humans, called thyX, and its ability to catalyze the DNA building block thymine. Results published in the journal 'Science.'

January class offered by UI's John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center is taking a group of students to an eye clinic in India where they will look for efficiencies and cost savings so the clinic can expand the vision services it offers to the poor.

Dan Murphy graduated from the UI medical school and eventually became team doctor for UNI's basketball team, but now he's providing desperately needed health care services in the impoverished Southeast Asian nation of East Timor.

In much of the developing world, fossil fuels and electricity are too expensive to be options for cooking. Instead, people there use wood burning stoves that create environmental impacts of their own, including desertification of the forests that supply the wood, and soot released when the wood doesn't burn completely.

A high-energy physics group, led by Yasar Onel and Jane Nachtman at the University of Iowa, has designed and built a sub-detector to better understand what happened immediately after the universe's birth. The Zero Degree Calorimeter measures particles' shower, which mimics hot plasma created right after the Big Bang.

University of Iowa students and faculty are attending the global climate talks this month in Paris. Four students from three colleges and a faculty member in engineering will further their research and report on what they see and learn at the COP 21 meeting.

A team of University of Iowa students will visit India in January to help a world-renowned eye doctor provide vision care and cataract surgery to more poor patients.

Jeffrey Ding, a senior from Iowa City, was selected as one of 32 American Rhodes scholars on Nov. 22 from a field of 869 applicants; 90 are named worldwide.

Two University of Iowa faculty members have been named fellows by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Pamela Geyer, in biochemistry and obstetrics and gynecology, and Amnon Kohen, in chemistry, will be honored at the AAAS annual meeting in February.

Paul Pinckley, admissions and financial director in the Tippie College of Business' full-time MBA program, has a new view on the applicants he interviews after spending three years managing a ship that provides basic health care services in remote parts of Cambodia.

In 2012, up-and-coming Cambodian filmmaker Polen Ly left medical school to pursue his true passion. He's been plenty busy since, including a productive stint at the University of Iowa International Writing Program this fall.

Mars has been all over the news, from the finding of seasonal water on the Red Planet to the successful film "The Martian." Now, researchers, including those at the UI, have learned more about what happened to Mars' climate since it was a warm, watery planet billions of years ago.