University of Iowa wellness programs cost about $120 per employee and about $15 per student annually, an investment officials say has paid off in fewer sick days, lower insurance costs, and some reduced harmful behaviors among students.

Gerhard Loewenberg, University of Iowa professor emeritus and former dean, will read from his new memoir, "Moved by Politics," at 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 24, in Prairie Lights Books in downtown Iowa City. The reading also will be streamed live on the UI Writing University website.

University of Iowa College of Law antitrust expert Herbert Hovenkamp expects to see stepped up antitrust activity from the Department of Justice during President Barack Obama’s second term as the government implements health care reform.

Philip Polgreen, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa, says that while new social media and crowdsourcing tools make it easier to track one of the worst flu seasons in a long time, such tools also have their limits and are timely supplements to traditional surveillance.

Hualing Nieh and her late husband, Paul Engle, founded the University of Iowa International Writing Program in 1967. IWP has since hosted more than 1,000 writers from 120 countries and regions. Nieh and IWP are the subject of a new documentary, One Tree: Three Lives.

A team of researchers led by the University of Iowa says a third mammoth has been located at a dig site in southern Iowa. The mammoths—at least two of them of the woolly species—roamed Iowa some 14,000 years ago. The team—including several UI undergraduates—is cleaning the bones at the UI's Museum of Natural History and preparing to resume digging in the spring.

Mary C. Noonan, associate professor of sociology at the University of Iowa and co-author of the recent study "The Hard Truth About Telecommuting," shares insights about the impact of telecommuting on family time and employee productivity.

Roberto Ampuero, a UI assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese who is on leave to serve as the Chilean ambassador to Mexico, is also a best-selling novelist and the creator of Cayetano Brulé, one of Spanish-language crime fiction's most traveled modern private eyes.

University of Iowa researcher Tara Smith writes about which animals are most likely to harbor diseases that can move to humans and the challenges of studying zoonotic pathogens.

Herbert Hovenkamp, a University of Iowa professor of antitrust law, says that one of the biggest antitrust investigations of an American company ended with a slap on the wrist for Google since there was a lack of consumer harm.

UI professor Armando Duarte, a choreographer at the UI since 1993, was inspired to create a three-week study abroad program in his native Brazil to share the culture of Carnival with UI students. He is currently in Brazil with 20 UI students so they can study the unique culture firsthand.

University of Iowa psychiatrist and gambling researcher Donald W. Black says his latest published study on compulsive gambling has found that the percentage of gamblers who report gambling problems has dropped despite the expansion of casinos in the state.