School of Arts & Sciences

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently awarded the University of Pennsylvania a $2 million grant to support University initiatives in the digital humanities in both Penn Arts and Sciences and Penn Libraries.

By Julie McWilliams Unlike some new college graduates who aren’t sure what their futures hold, four May graduates of the University of Pennsylvania have known for years where their paths will lead. All completed the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Penn, and this spring, they finalized their duty stations.

It’s a long road from the University of Pennsylvania to Amsterdam, but cancer research knows no bounds. 

For members of the Korean rap group Klass, expressing themselves through their music is empowering them to learn new skills and inspiring them to pursue their passions. When the group’s founder James An, was 10, his family moved from Gwangmyeong-Si, South Korea, to Vancouver, British Columbia, and as he was adapting to life in Canada he would emulate rap performers such as Eminem.

University of Pennsylvania astronomers are celebrating the dedication of a new planet-hunting telescope known as Minerva-Red. Installed at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona, Minerva-Red is part of the Minerva project, an array of low-cost telescopes that are designed to discover planets orbiting stars other than the sun.

If you have a map, you can know where you are without knowing which way you are facing. If you have a compass, you can know which way you're facing without knowing where you are. Animals from ants to mice to humans use both kinds of information to reorient themselves in familiar places, but how they determine this information from environmental cues is not well understood.

Bonding with a friend of a friend is something most humans gravitate toward naturally, or at least Facebook likes to think so every time it suggests friends for you to “friend.”

By Julie McWilliams

Thanks to a creative collaboration, students at the University of Pennsylvania presented a check for $7,291.25 to the local hunger relief organization Philabundance, on May 1.

The compound eyes found in insects and some sea creatures are marvels of evolution. There, thousands of lenses work together to provide sophisticated information without the need for a sophisticated brain. Human artifice can only begin to approximate these naturally self-assembled structures, and, even then, they require painstaking manufacturing techniques.