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Black boys, grief, and guns in urban schools
A young student of color looks upward with their hand on their mouth

Black boys, grief, and guns in urban schools

Nora Gross, a joint doctoral candidate in sociology and education, examines how students grieve and recover after gun violence kills peers.

Penn Today Staff

Researchers think small to make progress toward better fuel cells
an x-ray scattering system made out of a long white tube connected to a sample box at one end. lee is shown in two separate images placing a sample inside of the box, partially obscured behind darkened panel glass

Researchers think small to make progress toward better fuel cells

A collaborative study describes how fuel cells, which use chemical energy to power cars and devices, can be developed to be more cost-effective and efficient in the long term.

Erica K. Brockmeier

Fall into the arts
Metal sculptures with lettering

“Talking Continents” by Jaume Plensa. (Photo: ©Jaume Plensa, courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co)

Fall into the arts

An active time of year for the arts community, the University’s fall arts and culture offerings range from a sculpture exhibit from Jaume Plensa, at Arthur Ross Gallery, to a viewing garden along the Rail Park.
What is ‘guaranteed income’?
Person holding a sheet of paper listing bills due
  • Q&A

    • What is ‘guaranteed income’?

    A Q&A with Amy Castro Baker, an assistant professor in the School of Social Policy & Practice and co-principal investigator of a new study examining the impacts of guaranteed income.
    New undergraduate design major launched in College of Arts and Sciences
    student setting up design exhibit with a jacket and a loom and a sign.

    The new undergraduate design major and a restructured fine arts major are a collaboration between the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the College of Arts and Sciences.

    New undergraduate design major launched in College of Arts and Sciences

    A new undergraduate major in design launched this semester, along with a now-enhanced fine arts major, is being offered through a collaboration between the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the College of Arts and Sciences.
    Hunter-gatherers agree on what is moral, but not who is moral
    Two people in traditional Tanzanian clothing sitting on the ground outdoors.

    Photo: Eduardo Azevedo

    Hunter-gatherers agree on what is moral, but not who is moral

    In determining whether there is a universal concept of moral character, research could provide insight into ways to improve our interactions with one another.

    Michele W. Berger

    Inferno in the rainforest
    Map of Brazil and other parts of South America showing myriad points of orange

    Sensors on NASA satellites Terra and Aqua captured a record of thousands of points of fire in Brazil in late August. The fires pose a threat to the Amazon rainforest and to people living in and around it. (Image: NASA Earth Observatory)

    Inferno in the rainforest

    Satellite images have detected more than 100,000 points of fire in the Amazon this year. Scientists Reto Gieré and Alain Plante illuminate some less obvious impacts of the fires, including health threats and climate impacts.

    Katherine Unger Baillie

    A molecular ‘atlas’ of animal development
    An abstract depiction of data features an elongated shape with various projections in pixels of different colors.

    Each cell of a developing nematode worm embryo is catalogued at the molecular level in a new paper out in Science. In this visualization of the dataset, each dot represents a single cell, its color represents the age of the embryo it came from (orange=early, green=mid, blue/red=late), and the dots are arranged so that cells with similar transcriptomes are near each other. Visualized this way, the data form various thin “trajectories” that correspond to tissues and individual cell types. (Image: Cole Trapnell)

    A molecular ‘atlas’ of animal development

    Scientists have studied the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans for decades, making essential contributions to basic science. In the latest milestone, a team uses cutting-edge technology to individually profile the genes expressed in more than 80,000 cells in a developing C. elegans embryo.

    Katherine Unger Baillie

    Crowdsourcing 10,000 years of land use
    A brown cow standing in a mountain landscape in the Italian Alps.

    To predict what will happen in the future, its important to understand what happened in the past. Thats the idea behind ArchaeoGLOBE, a project that looks at land use around the world—like in the Italian Alps, seen here—during the past 10,000 years. (Photo courtesy: Lucas Stephens) 

    Crowdsourcing 10,000 years of land use

    More than 250 archaeologists from around the world contributed their knowledge to ArchaeoGLOBE, an effort to better understand the prevalence of agriculture, pastoralism, and hunting and gathering at different points in human history.

    Michele W. Berger