Some 70 elementary school girls learned that using Vaseline and Kool Aid to make lip gloss can be educational and fun when they participated in “Black Girls Do Science,” a one-day camp for girls in grades 4-8 held April 12 at the University of Iowa College of Engineering.

A May 1 presentation and panel discussion hosted by University of Iowa ITS Instructional Services will focus on the growing use of eTextbooks and the emerging uses of digital course content on the UI campus.

A one block section of Court Street near the Voxman Music Building construction site will be closed April 21 to June 30. The closure will affect both the east- and westbound lanes of traffic and south sidewalk from Capitol Street to Clinton Street.

The University of Iowa has been awarded $1.2 million to establish one of only five University Centers of Exemplary Mentoring in the nation. The three-year grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation recognizes the UI's long history of recruiting and educating minority students in STEM fields.

Cyndie Schmeiser, who has had an impact on the education of nearly every student in the United States through her work at ACT and the creation of the Common Core State Standards, will speak at UI College of Education’s Distinguished Speaker Series Wednesday, April 23, at 1 p.m. in N140 Lindquist Center.

UI graduate students will lead Iowa Lyceum, a free summer program that introduces area high school students to philosophy, helping them build critical thinking skills and college readiness.

University of Iowa faculty poets Robyn Schiff and Mark Levine will read from their work at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 24, in a free reading at Prairie Lights Books in downtown Iowa City. The reading also will be streamed live on the University of Iowa Writing University website.

Visiting artist Erik Levine, associate professor of art at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, will give a public lecture at 6:30 p.m. Friday, April 18, in Room 116 at Art Building West. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Do you dig the Ice Age? Come learn more as Greg McDonald of the National Park Service discusses recent fossil discoveries in Colorado. McDonald will speak at 7 p.m., Thursday, April 24, at an Explorers Seminar in the Biosphere Discovery Hub in the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History.

The Public Policy Center (PPC) will host a daylong symposium examining the role of women in American politics on Friday, April 18 in the Old Capitol Museum. The keynote speaker will be Amy Klobuchar, a U.S. senator from Minnesota. The symposium is part of the PPC's 25th anniversary celebration.

Inexpensive computers, cell phones, and other devices that substitute flexible plastic for silicon chips may be one step closer to reality, thanks to research published in the journal Nature Communications.

In a paper published in the April 16 print issue of the journal Neuron, UI researchers Bernd Fritzsch and Jeremy Duncan and their colleagues at Harvard Medical School, along with investigator and corresponding author Elizabeth Engle, describe how their studies on mutated mice mimic human mutations responsible for an eye mobility disorder.