Heather Davis

On Ian Lustick’s computer screen, masses of tiny multicolored squares represent thousands of people with different beliefs, economic status and ethnic backgrounds. With a few deft keystrokes, Lustick makes events shift, causing the squares to change position. To the untrained eye, it looks like nothing more than green and red squares. It’s actually much more.

Penn’s Masters of Chemistry Education program has been helping middle and secondary level teachers expand and improve their knowledge of the subject since 2001. Now, teachers who feel lacking in science expertise will be able to turn to Penn for even more help.

In late September, when the arthritis drug Vioxx was pulled from the shelves by Merck & Co., Garret FitzGerald, chairman of the Department of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine, thought it a wise move. And it hardly surprised him.

It’s hardly surprising that brain damage can change the way some people express themselves artistically. For people with Alzheimer’s, autism, or affected by stroke—three very different kinds of brain damage—the art may even get richer and more nuanced, or cleaner and simpler, depending on the effects of the disease, according to one Penn researcher.

Foreign film fans, take note: your best chance to see some of the finest work being produced by new Italian directors is coming soon to a theater near you. The five-day film festival, “New Authors of Italian Cinema, 6th Edition,” runs from Nov.

When Anita Allen was young, she attended Sunday School every week, Vacation Bible School in the summer and sang in her church choir. She began reading philosophy as a teenager, studied the subject in college and graduate school and began her career teaching ethics at Carnegie Mellon University.

During the manual recount and examination of Florida ballots from the 2000 Presidential election, late-night comedians and editorial cartoonists had a field day with jokes about aging Florida voters. One cartoon from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune went as far as to call some voters “confused, simple-instructions-challenged Florida retirees.”

The legal issues that captivate our country range from women’s rights to the role of religion in elections, gay marriage to national security, campaign finance reform to medical malpractice. And there’s one forum that ensures a lively, provocative discussion from experts on both sides of an issue—without the yelling and name-calling.

FACULTY Q&A/A renowned anthropologist searches for stories and meaning in the Australian desert. When Peggy Reeves Sanday began researching the sacred stories about Australia’s Wolfe Creek Crater—a crater discovered by her father in 1947—she found the Aborigines who live near the crater decidedly tight-lipped.

The health-conscious know that they’re likely to wreak havoc on their hips if they eat too much at Thanksgiving dinner or dip too heartily into gigantic supermarket dispensers of candy. But what if they sampled just a little bit of each potato dish or just a couple pieces of each gummy color?