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School of Arts & Sciences
Pigment and parchment
Undergraduate and graduate students were paired with visiting scholars during a Penn Libraries workshop to paint illustrations like those in centuries-old illuminated manuscripts.
Ten trends in American animation
Linda Simensky, a visiting professor of cinema studies and the vice president of children’s programming at PBS, talks top trends in animation today.
Cutting and folding toward innovations in medicine, design, and more
Artist-in-residence Mike Tanis and physicist Randall Kamien use kirigami, literally “cut paper,” to better grasp scientific concepts and to solve real-world challenges.
Meeting of minds
With the Penn Alumni Reading Club, the Center for Africana Studies delivers intellectual engagement directly to alumni—and the public.
Inside man
Nick Miller, a senior inside linebacker on the Penn football team and a unanimous First-Team All-Ivy selection, chats about his incredible Quaker career.
Up, up, and away
Mark Devlin and his team behind BLAST are about to embark on another scientific adventure in Antarctica, this time measuring how stars form in our galaxy.
Cells and cinema
As a biology major, senior Andrew Ravaschiere spends much of his time in a laboratory conducting cellular research. But as a cinema and media studies minor, he got out of the lab and into the world of filmmaking during the summer, working as an intern for a documentary filmmaker.
How do individual decisions affect group decisions?
Postdoctoral fellow Colin Twomey looks to fish behavior to explore the dynamic between individual and group decision-making.
Bigger brains are smarter, but not by much
Using a large dataset and controlling for a variety of factors, including sex, age, height, socioeconomic status, and genetic ancestry, Gideon Nave of the Wharton School and Philipp Koellinger of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam found that people with larger brains rated higher on measures of intelligence, but only accounts for two percent of the variation in smarts.
Where do comets originate?
A new technique developed by team of Penn astronomers may allow the scientists to measure radiation from celestial bodies that are only theorized to exist.
In the News
Suddenly there aren’t enough babies. The whole world is alarmed
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde of the School of Arts & Sciences estimates that global fertility last year fell to below global replacement for the first time in human history.
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The world’s oceans just broke an important climate change record
Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences says that the warming of the oceans is helping to destabilize ice shelves and fuel more powerful hurricanes and tropical cyclones.
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Philadelphia’s Tyshawn Sorey wins Pulitzer Prize in music
Tyshawn Sorey of the School of Arts & Sciences has won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in music for “Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith),” a concerto for saxophone and orchestra.
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Jerome Rothenberg, who expanded the sphere of poetry, dies at 92
Charles Bernstein of the School of Arts & Sciences says that the late Jerome Rothenberg was the ultimate hyphenated person: a poet-critic-anthologist-translator.
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He started college in prison. Now, he is Rutgers-Camden’s first Truman scholar
Tej Patel, a third-year in the Wharton School and College of Arts and Sciences from Billeria, Massachusetts, was one of 60 college students nationwide chosen to be a Truman Scholar.
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