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Alcohol czar

Baruch S. Blumberg

Amid good-humored joking in the media about E.T. and little green men, biochemist Baruch Blumberg, M.D., Ph.D., was appointed by NASA to head up its new Astrobiology Institute. The Institute’s aims include the study of the evolution of life on Earth and the search for signs of life on other planets.

A fateful conversation

Chair of Theater Arts Cary Mazer (left) portrays German physicist Werner Heisenberg, Senior Lecturer in Theater Arts James Schlatter is Danish physicist Niels Bohr and Lecturer in Theater Arts Rose Malague plays Margarethe Bohr in the Penn Reading Project’s reading of Michael Frayn’s play “Copenhagen.Ó The play imagines Heisenberg and Bohr’s 1941 conversation about the morality of helping Nazi Germany with the atom bomb. The reading was in the reopened Main Hall of Irvine Auditorium.

Cybershopper struggles to splurge

  Photo by Mark Garvin Imagine getting $500 a week, free and clear, every week of the semester, to spend on anything you wanted — but with one catch: It all has to be spent on line, no visiting actual stores allowed. For Tomiko Jones (C’99), who won just that in a contest sponsored by Levi, Strauss & Co., it proved not to be much of a catch at all.

Lost treasure found

Last summer, Penn archaeologist Frederik Hiebert stumbled across artifacts that restored the reputation of a forgotten archaeologist and improved our understanding of the ancient cultures of Central Asia. The artifacts were found in New Hampshire, of all places. That was where turn-of-the-century geologist Raphael Pumpelly spent his summers. And the artifacts in question were his papers, diaries, drawings and photos — the stuff that he would eventually organize into books documenting his research.

“The anchorÓ floats

College house changes

Six new appointments to college houses have been announced by David B. Brownlee, director of College Houses and Academic Services. Peter J. Conn Interim Faculty Master

Time to hit the bookshelves

Becky Hashim (C’03) loads up on all the books she will need for her fall semester courses at Penn on the first day of classes Sept. 8. Hashim’s all-at-once buying was typical for the female students who flocked to the Penn Bookstore on that day, but the men were another story: many of them bought only two or three books. A Bookstore manager offered a possible explanation for the gender gap in buying: The guys need party money for the weekend. Photo by Daniel R. Burke

Tonight was the night

Editor's note: The Go West! Arts and Restaurant Festival, scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 16, was selected as the “Editor’'s Pick” for the Sept. 16 issue. Unfortunately, Sept. 16 was the day Hurricane Floyd passed through the Philadelphia area, forcing the festival’s cancellation. The “Go West! 3rd Thursdays” series of special events will formally kick off on Oct. 21 with a special event at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Look for information about this event in our Oct. 14 issue. --S.S.

It’s a material world

For several decades now, some of the world’s brightest physicists have been trying to figure out how rocks, and water, and air, and all the other stuff in the universe came to be. The reason this question is so interesting is because in theory, there shouldn’t be any stuff in the universe at all.