2020 has been — well, take your pick of adjective: Difficult. Uncertain. Unpredictable. Unprecedented. Challenging. By now, we’ve all heard and used these words so many times that they hardly do justice to the collective whiplash and mind-boggling paradigm shifts we’ve adjusted to during the past months.
Can religious texts be changed by the scribe copying them down? Associate Professor of Religious Studies Molly Zahn's new book Genres of Rewriting in Second Temple Judaism explores the evolution of religious texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
As the first month of 2020 comes to an end, we're taking a look back at some of our favorite KU stories of 2019.
What does it mean to commemorate a moment in time? For Professor of Communication Studies Dave Tell, commemorating the legacy of the murder of Emmett Till has taken him on a journey from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago. As part of the Emmett Till Memory Project, Tell has worked with Till's family to help shepherd his story and to preserve his memory.
If you spent any time on social media this summer, you probably heard that United States government agencies confirmed the existence of video footage of UFOs taken by military aircraft. The videos reignited speculation about the presence of alien life visiting Earth.
What does human trafficking look like? Most of us have seen stories of captivity play out on big or small screen with familiar casts of villains and victims. Compelling drama, perhaps, but the reality is far more complicated, and closer to home, than we might like to imagine. Make no mistake, says KU researcher Hannah Britton: it’s happening in the Heartland, and often in plain sight.
When most of us imagine a “lab,” familiar images and associations come to mind: sterile spaces equipped with white coats and Petri dishes, beakers, glass test tubes and granulated cylinders galore. Spaces where life-changing discoveries are made, no doubt — but Katie Rhine and her dedicated team of fellow scholars had something else in mind.
What’s the foundation of a city? For urban planner Ward Lyles, the spaces we inhabit are defined as much by an approach to life, and the people we encounter, as they are by the systems and physical structures that make up a sound infrastructure. The way he sees it, the true bedrock of a strong community lies in a simple, yet immensely powerful, guiding principle: compassion.
Do aliens exist on Mars? Possibly. But how do humans actually go about answering that question? One option is to examine rocks to understand the types of life-forms, like squishy things, that roamed the earth billions of years ago. That's what Alison Olcott does in her role as associate professor of paleobiogeochemistry in the Department of Geology at the University of Kansas. And while playing on Google Maps one day, Alison found that the rocks she needed to study are found not far from KU, in the Gypsum Hills of Kansas. Who knew Kansas and Mars were so similar!