Penn in the News

Mathias Basner of the Perelman School of Medicine is interviewed about sleep deprivation, the relationship between work and sleep and other topics about the science of sleep.

For some academics, the social network Reddit is becoming less of a guilty pleasure and more of a credible platform to discuss academic interests with people whom they otherwise would not have had a chance to debate. Because of Reddit’s decentralized structure, any user is free to create a community, or subreddit, around any topic. That structure has spawned everything from forums organized around broad subject areas such as politics, technology and video games to catalogs of bizarre memes and safe havens for racism and misogyny.

Senator Marco Rubio, laying out an economic blueprint that will be central to his campaign for president, called Tuesday for dismantling the “cartel of existing colleges and universities” that he said left too many students without viable career paths and burdened by tens of thousands of dollars in debt. In a speech that was part history lesson, part policy prescription, and punctuated with barbs at Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr.

With its growing global clout, China has become the place to be for American colleges, with the number of academic partnerships and programs there increasing each year. But a law proposed by the Chinese government to regulate foreign universities and nonprofit organizations could put those warming relations on ice. Under the draft legislation, overseas colleges would be required to register with the national police ministry and have an official Chinese sponsor for all their activities, from study abroad to student recruitment, faculty lectures to joint research.

Martin Seligman of the School of Arts & Sciences comments on how the heart can benefit from happiness.

The Human Terrain System set off intense debates among anthropologists and other social scientists when the U.S. Army in 2005-6 introduced the idea of embedding scholars with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan. In theory, the scholars would help the military understand ethnic groups that were mysterious to soldiers, potentially saving the lives of Americans and those who lived in the region. But from the program's start, many anthropologists and others saw the program as a violation of their disciplines' ethical standards.

Matthew Blaze of the School of Engineering and Applied Science is cited for contributing to a paper about encryption.

The U.S. Education Department dismissed a complaint against Harvard University alleging the school discriminated against Asian-American applicants. The government dismissed the suit on June 3 because a similar lawsuit is being considered in federal court. The dismissal was reported earlier Tuesday by Bloomberg.

Emily Kramer-Golinkoff of the Perelman School of Medicine is featured for being honored as one of nine “Champions of Change” by the White House.

Daniel Polsky of the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School and Janet Weiner of Medicine are highlighted for studying how many doctors were in the health-insurance networks available to customers receiving health-care via the Affordable Care Act.