Is it some kind of harmonic convergence that has made a cappella singing so popular with students at Penn?

While the virtues of online holiday shopping are undisputed, somehow the spirit of the season and the search for the perfect gift demands some hands-on experience with our consumer culture on steroids.

Nancy Bonini, a professor of biology, and her colleagues are using fruit flies to investigate Parkinson’s disease, the second most common human neurodegenerative disorder. They found that medication prevented the onset of a similar disorder in genetically-predisposed Drosophila melanogaster.

When Philadelphia architects Robert Venturi (Hon’80), Denise Scott Brown (GCP’60,GAr’65,Hon’94) and Steven Izenour (GAr’65) published their landmark analysis of the iconography of the Las Vegas strip, “Learning from Las Vegas,” in 1972, it created a tidal wave of controversy and fresh ideas that architect Susan Nigra Snyder surfs today. Among her ideas that defy conventional wisdom:

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Mark Devlin is having a BLAST. That stands for Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope, a NASA project designed to view some of the oldest galaxies in the universe.

Tony Aiello is a patient man. He has just returned from his first botanical specimen-hunting trip to China with a cache of seeds from six species of oaks, two of which have never been seen by botanists before, a rare species of maple and a relative of the elm tree. He will plant them in the greenhouse at the Morris Arboretum and he will wait. Some seeds take up to two years just to germinate.

PHILADELPHIA - Samuel H. Preston, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, has named leading criminologist Lawrence W. Sherman as the new Director of the Fels Center of Government. Sherman will also be appointed the Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations in the Department of Sociology.