The University of Iowa has teamed up with the National Science Foundation to establish a program for accelerating commercialization of technologies developed by student and faculty inventors and entrepreneurs, especially those developed by women.

Small schools in rural communities often have a hard time finding enough students and teachers to offer Advanced Placement (AP) classes. In Iowa, the state has worked to deal with the problem by offering online AP classes through the UI College of Education’s Belin-Blank Center.

The University of Iowa College of Engineering will require that all new undergraduate students take at least three semesters of creative art credit to earn an engineering degree, beginning in fall 2015.

STEM-talented middle school students in 11 high-poverty districts in rural Iowa are participating in the UI Belin-Blank Center’s STEM Excellence and Leadership program that will build a pipeline to high school AP courses. Economically-vulnerable students often fall through the cracks without specialized programming, according to center director Susan Assouline.

Leaders for the University of Iowa’s OneIT project have prepared draft project charters which address the university’s four information technology business cases related to the TIER initiative. The campus is encouraged to provide feedback via two avenues.

UI neuroscientist Andrew Pieper and colleagues at three other universities, show that bone marrow transplant does not rescue mouse models of Rett syndrome, a severe neurological disease that affects very young girls. The findings directly contradict seemingly promising results published in 2012, which initiated a clinical trial for human patients.

Hundreds of entrepreneurs are in Iowa City this week for Entrefest, an annual conference that helps Iowans learn how to start their own businesses, co-sponsored by by the University of Iowa and the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center.

University of Iowa provost and engineering professor P. Barry Butler, who hasn't been involved in the recall, was part of a team that worked with General Motors and Ford a decade ago on passenger air bag inflators. They created software to model combustion of the propellant, he said.

Beginning the week of June 1, the Iowa Now Top News Digest will be sent out once a week, each Thursday, over the summer months. Other substantive and time-sensitive news will be published in Iowa Now throughout the week and/or pitched to media and shared via social channels.

More Iowans will learn about the many roles the State Hygienic Laboratory performs in safeguarding their health, as the University of Iowa Mobile Museum makes its way across the state.

Business students earning an Associate of Applied Sciences (AAS) degree at Kirkwood Community College will be able to transfer more easily into the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business thanks to a new degree program offered by the two schools.

When University of Iowa archivist David McCartney asked readers for help in identifying a long-gone building on Iowa Avenue, they responded.