Through
4/26
School of Arts & Sciences
100th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution
November marks the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, when Vladimir Lenin led the Bolsheviks to overthrow the Provisional Government following the collapse of Tsarist rule.
Penn Researchers Working to Mimic Giant Clams to Enhance the Production of Biofuel
Alison Sweeney of the University of Pennsylvania has been studying giant clams since she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Penn Biologists Show How Chromosomes ‘Cheat’ for the Chance to Get Into an Egg
Each of your cells contains two copies of 23 chromosomes, one inherited from your father and one from your mother. Theoretically, when you create a gamete — a sperm or an egg — each copy has a 50-50 shot at being passed on. But the reality isn’t so clearcut.
Luck Plays a Role in How Language Evolves, Penn Team Finds
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.
Penn Researchers Demonstrate How to Control Liquid Crystal Patterns
When Lisa Tran set out to investigate patterns in liquid crystals, she didn’t know what to expect. When she first looked through the microscope, she saw dancing iridescent spheres with fingerprint-like patterns etched into them that spiraled and flattened as the solution they were floated in changed.
Penn’s Restoring Active Memory Project Adds Task and Patient Data to Publicly Available Human Brain Dataset
The Restoring Active Memory project run by the University of Pennsylvania has just released human intracranial brain recording and stimulation data for 102 new patients and a new spatial-navigation task developed by researchers at Columbia University.
Geometry Plays an Important Role in How Cells Behave, Penn Researchers Report
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.
Penn Physicists Help Spot Explosive Counterpart of LIGO/Virgo’s Latest Gravitational Waves
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.
Penn Freshman English Seminar Explores Philadelphia as Its Classroom
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.
Seven Penn Faculty Members Elected to National Academy of Medicine
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.
In the News
Christian Science Monitor
A majority of Americans no longer trust the Supreme Court. Can it rebuild?
Matthew Levendusky of the School of Arts & Sciences says that a partisan trust gap has emerged in public perception of the Supreme Court as a conservative institution.
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The Washington Post
Forecast group predicts busiest hurricane season on record with 33 storms
A research team led by Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences is predicting the upcoming Atlantic hurricane season will produce the most named storms on record, fueled by exceptionally warm ocean waters and an expected shift from El Niño to La Niña.
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Baltimore Banner
Baltimore expands anti-gun-violence strategy into Eastern District
An analysis released by the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the School of Arts & Sciences suggests that a group violence reduction strategy drove a 2022 drop in shootings in Baltimore’s Western District.
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WHYY (Philadelphia)
My Climate Story: Philly students take science from abstract to personal
The “My Climate Story” project at the Environmental Humanities Department helps students and teachers learn about climate change’s impact in everyday backyards, with remarks from Bethany Wiggin. The idea is credited to María Villarreal, a College of Arts and Sciences second-year from Tampico, Mexico.
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SciTechDaily
Satellite images capture extraordinary flooding in the United Arab Emirates
Michael Mann of the School of Arts & Sciences explains how three low-pressure systems formed a train of storms that battered the United Arab Emirates.
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