One of the Navy's first female fighter pilots who currently studies artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is among the five internationally recognized neuroscientists who will deliver free public lectures during the University of Iowa's Health Sciences Research Week 2012.

A public lecture about human skin color and the opening of an art exhibit of DNA portraits will kick off the “What Does It Mean to be Human?” program series Thursday, March 29, through Sunday, April 1, at the University of Iowa.

A University of Iowa College of Law researcher believes that threats from utilities to shut off power over long-past debts are a coercive tactic that violates the utility’s public responsibilities for delivering essential services and should be prohibited by the Iowa Utilities Board.

Economies only grow when they allow people to innovate, but a pair of University of Iowa legal scholars think federal law as it exists now does not encourage creativity, and even actively works to stifle it. Their new book outlines a way to change this.

The decommissioning of the Tevatron represented the end of an era, but it also is ushering in the next generation of physics by providing valuable equipment to other experiments. At the University of Iowa Yasar Onel is using cast-off equipment to design a calorimeter that can detect secondary emissions from particle collisions in high-radiation environments.

UI psychologist Michelle Voss says lifestyle factors can help offset the loss of brain plasticity, making learning more possible for the elderly.

News media are invited to a briefing on the annual "Cancer in Iowa" report at 10 a.m. Wednesday, March 28, in the Ellig Classroom (N12) of the College of Public Health Building.

The UI employs 13 full-time staff members and nine students for the Iowa Floodplain Mapping Project of the Iowa Flood Center. The team, established following the catastrophic 2008 floods, began digitizing Iowa floodplains last year.

Tom Casavant, director of the UI Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, who is working this semester with the Plant Energy Biology Center in Australia, took part in a 20-kilometer swimming race in the Indian Ocean.

“Evolution in Iowa Backyards: What the Insects Eating Apples and Sunflowers Tell Us About Origins of Species” is the subject of a lecture by University of Iowa biology professor Andrew Forbes at 7 p.m., Thursday, March 22, in the Biosphere Discovery Hub of the UI Museum of Natural History.