The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop will host a free reading by poet Michael Palmer at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 15, in the Frank Conroy Reading Room of the Glenn Schaeffer Library, adjacent to the Dey House.

Hawkeye golfer Gigi DiGrazia spent her winter break at a health clinic in India, preparing for what she hopes will be a career in medicine.

The Ten Minute Play Festival, featuring eight plays written by University of Iowa undergraduate students, will be showing at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, Feb. 14-16, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 17, in Theatre B of the UI Theatre Building.

Nacho Zamora—entrepreneur, curator of public art, and director of the Solar Artworks Project based in Dubai—will give a guest lecture at 6 p.m. Friday, Feb. 8, in Room 240 of Art Building West on the University of Iowa campus. The lecture is free and the public is welcome to attend.

A University of Iowa team showed that the amygdala is not the only gatekeeper of fear in the human mind in a paper published recently in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The UI's Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research (CGRER) is helping faculty and graduate students learn how to effectively communicate their research. The project involves producing short videos, with CGRER staff help.

John Wemmie, a UI neuroscientist, shares insights from an experiment on how SM, a woman with a rare illness that damaged her amygdala and left her unafraid, recently experienced a panic attack, which may have practical value in the study of panic attacks.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Radio features John Spencer and Sammy Perone's University of Iowa psychology research into how infants learn to look and how looking helps them learn.

Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter, faculty members in the University of Iowa Department of English and the Nonfiction Writing Program, will read from their new book, "Understanding the Essay," at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 14, in a free reading at Prairie Lights Books in downtown Iowa City. The reading also will be streamed live on the UI Writing University website.

Researchers at the University of Iowa say the human brain has a new, second gatekeeper that registers fear. The region, perhaps the brainstem, diencephalon or insular cortex, signals fear from internal dangers. The finding could lead to more precise treatment for people suffering from panic attacks and other anxiety disorders. Results appear in "Nature Neuroscience."

The University of Iowa School of Music will present a free performance by pianist Roberta Rust at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 13, in Riverside Recital Hall on the UI campus. The program will feature works by Mozart, Claude Debussy, Enrique Granados, John Cage, and George Gershwin.

If successful, this work could be used by semiconductor electronics companies to design high-speed, low-power electronics for computers, cell-phones, and any other device whose performance is limited by battery storage.