School of Arts & Sciences

Early diagnosis is critical in treating Lyme disease. However, nearly one quarter of Lyme disease patients are initially misdiagnosed because currently available serological tests have poor sensitivity and specificity during the early stages of infection.

A psychological experiment known as “the marshmallow test” has captured the public’s imagination as a marker of self control and even as a predictor of future success. This test shows how well children can delay gratification, a trait that has been shown to be as important to scholastic performance as traditional IQ.

Marissa Nicosia, a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, and four alumni are recipients of Rare Book School Mellon Fellowships in Critical Bibliography for early-career scholars.

The zoot suit is remembered as a “killer-diller” men’s suit of a long bygone era, but it was more than just a fashion statement, as research by Kathy Peiss, a University of Pennsylvania historian, shows. 

University of Pennsylvania alum Evelyn Boettcher has been awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to pursue a Ph.D.

Craig Seligman wrote of the University of Pennsylvania’s latest Kelly Writers House Fellow,

Lawrence Lessig, a University of Pennsylvania alumnus and public intellectual, is leading a charge to overhaul the U.S. Constitution.

The brain’s prefrontal cortex is thought to be the seat of cognitive control, working as a kind of filter that keeps irrelevant thoughts, perceptions and memories from interfering with a task at hand. Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that inhibiting this filter can boost performance for tasks in which unfiltered, creative thoughts present an advantage.

Higher mortality rates among Americans younger than 50 are responsible for much of why life expectancy is lower in the United States than most of the world’s most developed nations.