School of Arts & Sciences

When University of Pennsylvania student Amy Phillips learned about the Girl Scouts at Penn program, she immediately joined.Having been a Scout from kindergarten through high school, Phillips was thrilled to be able to continue her involvement at Penn.

When the human genome was first sequenced, experts predicted they would find about 100,000 genes. The actual number has turned out to be closer to 20,000, just a few thousand more than fruit flies have. The question logically arose: how can a relatively small number of genes lay the blueprint for the complexities of the human body?

At the turn of the millennium, the cost to sequence a single human genome exceeded $50 million, and the process took a decade to complete. Microbes have genomes, too, and the first reference genome for a malaria parasite was completed in 2002 at a cost of roughly $15 million. But today researchers can sequence a genome in a single afternoon for just a few thousand dollars.

By Christina Cook

An academically-based community service course at the University of Pennsylvania hosted an end-of-the-semester performance, “The Ground on Which We Stand,” Sunday, Dec. 14 at 2 p.m. at the Platt Performing Arts House, 3702 Spruce St.

By Madeleine Stone   @themadstoneScience fiction is often said to reflect human culture: who we are today and what we dream to be in the future. But those who write on the future also have a hand in shaping it. Indeed, many future thinkers of the past have predicted technologies of the present with uncanny accuracy.

Origami is capable of turning a simple sheet of paper into a pretty paper crane, but the principles behind the paper-folding art can also be applied to making a microfluidic device for a blood test, or for storing a satellite's solar panel in a rocket’s cargo bay.   

Rutendo Chigora, a University of Pennsylvania senior from Harare, Zimbabwe, has been named one of Zimbabwe’s two recipients of a Rhodes Scholarship which will fund two or three years of study at Oxford University in England. At Oxford, Chigora will pursue a master's degree in public policy.

Arrests for violence committed by disadvantaged urban adolescents decrease by as much as 43 percent when the young people have summer jobs, according to new research from the University of Pennsylvania.

The University of Pennsylvania will host “Race, Poverty and Change in America: The Persistent Dilemmas of Equity and Equality” Dec. 4-5 in the Fitts Auditorium of Penn’s Law School, 3400 Chestnut St.