New weapon in ALS fight? Yeast
A Penn researcher has found a promising new way to study the progression of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)—and he’s turned to a common kitchen product to do so. Read more ...
Uncovering the history of a ‘lost’ city
Survey teams have uncovered an area on the shores of Greece's Saronic Gulf, about 60 miles southwest of Athens, believed to be the ancient site of a major Mycenaean harbor town. Read more ...
Groups battle to ‘own’ the Olympics
Penn professor Monroe Price says groups of all kinds hope to use the Beijing Olympics to get their
message out. Olympic organizers, meanwhile, will try to keep those groups at bay. Read more ...
ATLAS to recreate the Big Bang
Designed to record and explore what happens when protons collide at nearly the speed of light, ATLAS will collect a staggering amount of data—enough to fill 100,000 data CDs per second, every second, or roughly equivalent to 50 billion phone calls being made at the same instant. Read more ...
Study sheds light on epidural denial
African Americans are more likely than other patients to refuse epidural pain relief, even though the method leads to better post-surgical outcomes. Read more ...
Many elderly rely on others to vote
Older Americans are routinely the largest voting age group, and, as a whole, can affect election outcomes. But one researcher at Penn’s School of Medicine says a large portion of this bloc is ignored each election season—the disabled and infirmed elderly. Read more ...
The right questions can stop abuse
Poor provider-patient communication can be a cause of an underreporting of domestic abuse. Read more ...
Study shows what ‘craving’ looks like
A Penn team says a new study illustrates why quitting smoking is so difficult. Read more ...
Hope for humans, with help from dogs
Researchers are testing B cell therapy in dogs that have lymphoma—in hopes that the vaccine may one day be used to also help treat humans with cancer. Read more ...
Obesity in older adults leads to increase in disabilities
A new study by two Penn researchers has found that older obese adults today are much more likely to suffer from disabilities than those a decade ago.. Read more ...
Brain waves offer insight into memory
A Penn team has identified, for the first time, the specific brain waves responsible for differentiating between real and false memories. Read more ...
How speech sounds convey meaning
Toddlers as young as 18 months have learned to ignore subtle speech distinctions not native to their own language. This sophisticated skill enables them to recognize how their parents use sounds to convey meaning. Read more ...
Gene therapy breakthrough at Penn
Researchers at Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine have discovered a new approach to transgenesis. Read more ...
Study links obesity, absenteeism
Researchers from Penn and Temple University have, for first time, documented a surprising link between childhood obesity and increased school absenteeism. Read more ...
A new way to reduce C-section risk?
One researcher set out to find if inducing labor—not when the health of the mother or child is in question, but based on a timetable derived by measuring a mother’s risk factors—could actually help lower the risks associated with C-sections. Read more ...
Finding better ways to save lives
The Center for Resuscitation Science, a new research center dedicated to improving care for, and survival rates of, victims of sudden deat, has set an ambitious goal: To improve critical care to the point where a full 50 percent of people who have been “dead”—no heartbeat, no respiration—for 15 minutes can actually be brought back to life. Read more ...
New report on DHS highlights failings, makes recommendations
A recent report on the City’s Department of Human Services casts new light on the agency—and systemic failures within the department that have put Philadelphia’s children at risk and resulted in several preventable deaths in recent years. Read more ...
How the nose smells, and clues to why sniffing helps
Of all the body’s systems, the one involved with smelling—the olfactory system—may be among the least studied. Penn neuroscientist Minghong Ma says she can understand why, but that hasn’t stopped her researching it—and making some important discoveries about how we smell. Read more ...
Penn engineering students design robot that plays the sitar—sort of
Robots have been designed to do all kinds of things, from vacuuming floors to welding car bodies to helping surgeons repair heart valves. Last year, four mechanical engineering students at Penn set out to see if they could design a robot that would play music like a sitar player. Read more ...
Researchers link water pollution, invasive plants
Drive up I-476 to the northeast corner of Pennsylvania and it’s easy to find pristine lakes and ponds—beautiful bodies of water that look the same today as they did decades ago. Unfortunately, say Timothy Block and Ann Rhoads, most lakes closer to the city have fared less well. Read more ...
Prof: Some vets have tolerance for torture
In the spring of 2004, William Holmes read Seymour Hersh’s disturbing New Yorker story on American soldiers’ abuse of Abu Ghraib prison detainees. Just a few months later, Holmes, an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology in Penn’s School of Medicine, embarked on a study of veterans’ levels of tolerance for detainee abuse, with funding from a VA Health Services development award. Read more ...
Do you like me as much as I like you?
Grace Kao is fascinated with friendship. The Penn sociology associate professor has spent much of her 10 years here pondering what it means to have a friend, who befriends whom and whether having a best friend translates into better grades in the middle and high school years. Read more ...
New study to explore causes of autism
According to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention one in 150 children in this country is affected by autism. Is the disorder on the rise? “It just seems like that” says Jennifer Pinto-Martin, a professor in Penn’s Nursing School and director of the Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities. Read more ...
In new study, Penn researchers question value of hospital ‘quality’ measures
When the federal government launched the Hospital Compare initiative earlier this decade, health care officials hoped the program would serve as a sort of Consumer Reports for the sick.
If a new study from two Penn professors is any indication, though, the effort—while clearly well intentioned—isn’t quite living up to its billing. Read more ...
Penn profs explore Gilded Age estate
It seems like a natural: Two Penn professors— an award winning architecture critic and a renowned landscape architect—teaming up to write a book together. It came about purely by chance, though, that Witold Rybczynski, the Martin & Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism and professor of real estate and Laurie Olin, practice professor of Landscape Architecture, came to work on “Vizcaya: An American Villa and its Makers.” Read more ...
Digging deep into a coal region’s decline
Anthracite coal once powered America’s locomotives, factories and iron forges. But beginning in the first half of the 20th century, it began to be replaced by cheaper forms of energy, such as bitumous coal, hydroelectric power and natural gas. Communities in Northeastern Pennsylvania that had been built around the anthracite mines, such as Pottsville and Hazelton, fell into steep decline. Read more ...
The power of opinion polling
It’s nearly impossible to imagine an election cycle without opinion polls or a product campaign without market research. But these social surveys are a fairly recent phenomenon, says Assistant Professor of History Sarah Igo. Read more ...
Driving ourselves to death?
David Dinges says suburban sprawl may be doing more than gobbling up green space and making Americans over-dependent on their cars.
That sprawl, he says, may actually be killing us. Read more ...
No 'miracles' in the desert
A new book from Penn's Robert Vitalis casts fresh light on U.S.-Saudi relations, delves deeply into the history of the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) and makes the case that some oft-repeated myths about ARAMCO’s “missionary” work—some claimed the company worked “miracles in the desert”— are mostly false. Read more ...
