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“The core experience of Mario is playgrounds,” says Jennifer deWinter, dean of Lewis College of Science and Letters and author of “Shigeru Miyamoto: Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda.” “It’s climbing and jumping and sliding and exploration. Look at that original movie, the core experience is the conflict. (The game has) never been about the conflict, it’s about the experience. How do you translate this experience?”

How did Assistant Professor Mohammad Asadi and his colleagues make the single-cell battery behind their rechargeability breakthrough? They started with one key constraint: To be practical, the battery had to operate at room temperature. Previous room temperature designs contained a liquid electrolyte, the material that carries ions between the cathode and anode. But in 2019, Asadi set out to create a solid-state version, meaning one with a solid electrolyte. He wasn’t sure how rechargeable the battery would be, but at a minimum, he saw two potential advantages: safety, and the ability to reduce weight and volume.

“There’s no such thing as a perfect game,” said Jennifer deWinter, dean of Lewis College of Science and Letters. “But if I had to ponder the brilliance of Tetris — and I think that is a fun thing to ponder — Tetris provides a pattern-based abstraction that allows people to go into a flow state, readily.”

The charge against former President Donald Trump “arises under New York law and it focuses on the falsification of a business record,” said Chicago-Kent Professor Harold Krent. “That’s a misdemeanor under New York state law, but it can be elevated to a felony if it’s found to be in connection with another criminal purpose, such as falsification of election filings, which might in fact be what’s at stake here.”

On Friday evening, March 24, the winner of the 2023 Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) was announced in Chicago. The venue was Crown Hall itself, a steel and glass masterwork by Mies van der Rohe on the campus he designed for the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Jury chair Sandra Barclay presented the award to the studio of Mexican architect Mauricio Rocha for its expansion of the Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City.

GPT-4 took all sections of the July 2022 bar exam and earned a score so high that it approaches the 90th percentile of test-takers, according to researchers Daniel Martin Katz, a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law, and Michael James Bommarito, a professor at the Michigan State University College of Law. “Our analysis highlights that GPT-4 has indeed passed the bar and has done so by a significant margin,” they wrote in a paper.

Adjunct Professor Christopher Garcia writes in an article that Seattle recently became the first U.S. city to add “caste” to its list of categories protected from discrimination.

Carol Ross Barney recently won the highest award given by the American Institute of Architects. She calls it a shining light for Chicago and for women in the field. CBS2 caught up with Barney to talk about her work and her vision.

“I heard so many people say, ‘Well, it might get the multiple choice but it will never get the essays,’” Chicago-Kent College of Law Katz said of his efforts giving GPT the bar exam. GPT-4 passed the Uniform Bar Exam, including the essay and performance test.

Fear of running out of power out of range of a recharging station is a major impediment to the widespread adoption of electric cars, but scientists in Illinois are changing that. Mohammad Asadi, an assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, last month co-published a paper in the journal Science with Larry A. Curtiss and other Illinois colleagues about their work on a novel lithium-air battery that has a solid electrolyte made with a mix of polymer and ceramic. By combining those two materials, the paper argued, the product could leverage both “ceramic’s high ionic conductivity and the high stability and high interfacial connection of the polymer.” The resulting battery, the paper claimed, has the potential for “reaching ultra-high power densities far beyond current lithium-ion technology.”