UI Opera Theatre and the UI Symphony Orchestra are bringing Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance” to the Hancher stage. “We really wanted something that everybody could come to,” says Bill Theisen, associate professor and director of opera. The operetta will be UI Opera Theatre’s inaugural Hancher performance.

A team of University of Iowa researchers used an immersive traffic simulation to determine why children have difficulty safely crossing busy streets. Participants ranged from 6 to 14 years old, and the 14-year-olds were the only group that managed to complete the simulation without being hit.

The University of Iowa’s world-renowned bicycle frame–building courses bring together art and engineering students to answer the question “How do you build a bike?” Conceived by art professor Steve McGuire in 2010, Fabrication and Design: Hand Built Bicycle has become the model for how to build a university bike-building course.

Acclaimed conductor and UI alumnus Gerhardt Zimmermann and pianist Garrick Ohlsson will join the UI Symphony Orchestra in a concert honoring the late James Dixon, the symphony’s former director and Zimmermann’s professor. “Iowa Now” recently sat down with Zimmermann to talk about his career and teacher.

University of Iowa volcanologist Ingrid Ukstins spent two weeks collecting samples from Yasur, a continuously erupting volcano on Tanna, an island in the remote South Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu, to study its chemical composition and determine how the gasses it produces may be affecting people who live nearby.

Jacob Isbell, a member of the University of Iowa Honors Program and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been named a 2017 Goldwater Scholar. The Goldwater Foundation also recognized UI junior Lance Heady with an honorable mention.

Robert Cargill, UI assistant professor of classics and religious studies, doesn’t mind being in front of a camera. He’s appeared on CNN’s series “Finding Jesus,” as well as the History Channel, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic Channel, to debunk bad scholarship and bring important humanities research to the public.

A bicycle named ArrowHED, designed and built by UI art professor Steve McGuire, won Best Mountain Bike, Singletrack Choice Award, at Bespoked 2017, an international show for bicycle frame-builders held in Bristol, UK.

Millions of women die every year from the simple household task of cooking. The University of Iowa is hosting a group of internationally recognized experts at a conference, Women’s Health and the Environment: Going up in Smoke, to address the silent global crisis of cookstove smoke.

The Noddle, a device invented by UI-spinout company Voxello, is a technology that helps patients communicate with their health care providers, even though they are unable to speak.

University of Iowa researchers have documented for the first time how melanoma cells form tumors. The team reports the process is similar to that of breast cancer cells, and they have successfully screened for two antibodies that stopped tumor formation in both cancers. Results published in the journal “PLOS One.”

Baseball-Reference.com, the definitive online guide for baseball statistics, started out as a project that CEO Sean Forman worked on in his spare time while finishing his doctorate in mathematics at the University of Iowa. Tolerated by his non-baseball-fan advisor, the site is now Forman’s fulltime job.