School of Arts & Sciences

A group of scholars at the University of Pennsylvania is actively engaged in the scholarly examination of the history of beliefs in ghosts and the phenomenon of ghost hunting.

Eliana Yankelev doesn’t let life’s biggest obstacles get in her way.A member of the track and field team at the University of Pennsylvania, the 20-year-old sophomore competes in sprints, hurdles and the long jump.

WHO:             Dwight Evans

The instructions for building all of the body’s proteins are contained in a person’s DNA, a string of chemicals that, if unwound and strung end to end, would form a sentence 3 billion letters long.

Four University of Pennsylvania graduate students have been named to the inaugural class of Emerging Leaders in Science and Society Fellows.  ELISS is sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Evolution does not operate with a goal in mind; it does not have foresight. But organisms that have a greater capacity to evolve may fare better in rapidly changing environments. This raises the question: does evolution favor characteristics that increase a species’ ability to evolve?

With a gift of $15 million, University of Pennsylvania trustee emeritus P. Roy Vagelos, C’50, Hon’99, and his wife, Diana, parents ’90, are continuing to ensure Penn’s leadership in energy research by endowing two professorships dedicated to this critically important field.

Burgeoning India is facing historic macroeconomic instability, and 2014 is shaping up to be a contentious election year there. Add a rapidly growing population and an overtaxed infrastructure, and it’s clear India is a case study in the urgent need for innovation.

It’s no coincidence that the expression “to leave a bitter taste in one’s mouth” has a double meaning; people often have strong negative reactions to bitter substances, which, though found in healthful foods like vegetables, can also signify toxicity. For this reason, the ability to sense bitterness likely played an important role in human evolution.

For solar panels, wringing every drop of energy from as many photons as possible is imperative.  This goal has sent chemistry, materials science and electronic engineering researchers on a quest to boost the energy-absorption efficiency of photovoltaic devices, but existing techniques are now running up against limits set by the laws of physics.