Sandy Smith

An alert University City Associates employee and a savvy co-worker managed to reverse a historical disaster Sept. 18 by recovering a nearly 200-year-old diary kept by a notable Philadelphia woman.

Photo by Candace diCarlo

For years, vancomycin has been the antibiotic of last resort -- the one doctors used when all others failed. But recent news of patients succumbing to new, vancomycin-resistant strains of bacteria has lent an urgency to efforts to find new drugs to combat these bugs.

He and his colleagues had talked about Penn's residential system for years. The point, however, was to change it -- and it finally happened in the space of one short year.

At the dawn of the new millennium, a new city called Technopolis will begin to rise on the Thracian coast in northeastern Greece. The city began as an idea in the head of Professor of City and Regional Planning Anthony Tomazinis. And he will head the effort to turn that idea into physical form.

Hillary Aisenstein (C'99) arrived at Penn from Las Vegas, full of vague notions about community service and involvement. Then, last year, she saw the light, and learned a lot about University City in the process. This summer, she decided to help turn her new neighborhood green, and has learned even more about University City and Philadelphia.

How many of us, as children, followed the exploits of America's astronauts and thought to ourselves, "Gee, wouldn't it be really neat to be an astronaut?"

Photo by Candace diCarlo

An FBI sting that led to the recovery of a rare artifact from ancient Peru came to a successful conclusion July 15, when FBI officials formally returned the object to the Peruvian ambassador to the United States, Ricardo Luna, in a ceremony at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.