UMaine Today Magazine

  Don Holder, UMaine class of 1980 and a two-time Tony award winner for lighting design on Broadway talks about his craft and what led him to spend his life pursuing his passion for lighting. He also talks about his experiences with the Maine Masque theatre program at UMaine and his unique career path from […]

The 1,865-acre Dwight B. Demeritt Forest features mixed forest stands, fields and waterways. Its mission, as it is with all the University Forests: research, demonstration and education. Transcript Keith Kanoti: The University Forest, if you add it all up, it’s about 14,000 acres owned by the University of Maine System and the University of Maine […]

Maine’s vibrant secondhand economy and culture of reuse are the focus of research led by Cynthia Isenhour, a University of Maine professor of anthropology and climate change. Her three-year, multidisciplinary project, as well as a digital ethnography field school and related work within the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions look into the […]

The rusty blackbird and Bicknell’s thrush, two species of migratory songbird whose populations are declining, have begun to overlap their previously distinct habitat ranges as a result of land management practices and other factors. Transcript Amber Roth: I’d say there are two aspects that are challenging for this research. One is the remoteness of where […]

Narrator: Austere and forbidding as they rise from the plains of northern India, the rugged Himalayas continue to challenge adventurous humans. This is particularly true of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain, which has just been scaled for the third time. Here now are the first pictures of the American triumph, called the 1963 National […]

Transcript [background music] Phillip Silver: My research is to find music by composers who, because they were Jewish, had their works banned. If any works were published, attempts were made to destroy any known copies of them. The desire was put into place by the Nazis to write these figures out of history. [pause] Phillip: […]

Transcript Sam Hess: The big challenge is that people still get sick from the flu. The virus mutates every year, so the vaccine is playing catch‑up to that. We’d really like to have something that could fight the flu even though it’s changing, even though it’s mutating. We’ve developed a technique called super‑resolution microscopy. It […]

The senior studio art capstone course taught by James Linehan at the University of Maine prepares students for a future career as an artist. An exhibition, featuring works created throughout the students’ time in college, is the final exam. Students are in charge of all aspects of the show, from selecting and hanging the pieces […]

Transcript [insects and wind] Lily Calderwood: When you go out to the barrens… David Yarborough: You’d see a nice, open environment that’s conducive to wildlife, such as turkeys. Lily Calderwood: We call these glacial deposits of land that are growing so many blueberries a blueberry barren. And that name does describe the place. It looks […]

Transcript David Yarborough: I’d like to give you an overview of wild blueberry production in Maine from the beginning, and to discuss the changes that have occurred and made it a $250 million industry. Wild blueberries colonized the soil after the last Ice Age receded. The action of the glacier created a well-drained sandy loam […]