School of Arts & Sciences

Read a few lines of Chaucer or Shakespeare and you’ll get a sense of how the English language has changed during the past millennium. Linguists catalogue these changes and work to discern why they happened. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists have been doing something similar with living things, exploring how and why certain genes have changed over generations.

Inspired by how geometry influences physical systems such as soft matter, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have revealed surprising insights into how the physics of molecules within a cell affect how the cell behaves.

Masao Sako of the University of Pennsylvania was on vacation with his family when he got the news. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, had made a fifth detection of gravitational waves, which expand and contract space time.

Seven University of Pennsylvania faculty members have been elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), one of the nation’s highest honors in biomedicine. They are among 70 new U.S. and 10 international members of the globally renowned organization.

A 20-minute trolley ride and a world away, the woods of Bartram’s Garden became an outdoor classroom for a group of University of Pennsylvania students this fall.

Have you ever been stuck in a rut, going through the same motions day in and day out? How do you motivate to change your behavior?

Human populations feature a broad palette of skin tones. But until now, few genes have been shown to contribute to normal variation in skin color, and these had primarily been discovered through studies of European populations.

As Hurricane Maria formed in the Atlantic, then turned into a powerful storm barreling toward Puerto Rico, Arjun Yodh watched the news closely.

The University of Pennsylvania is lending a helping hand after a series of disasters leveled areas across the Western Hemisphere.

No one can travel inside the earth to study what happens there. So scientists must do their best to replicate real-world conditions inside the lab.