Making a Muscle
"If we could figure out how to control a gene as banal and uninteresting as making a kid's hair blond," says Susan Abmayr, "we could figure out how to cure muscular dystrophy." Abmayr, an assistant professor of molecular genetics, is pursuing insights into that disease by studying muscle-making genes in the fruit fly.
Guiding Stars
"Something is fundamentally wrong with our understanding of the universe if these numbers hold true," says astronomer Robin Ciardullo about one of his recent discoveries. Another has led a colleague to tell him, "I occasionally wake up with nightmares about your galaxy."
The Quest for Castleford's Chronicle
A 1940 footnote led medievalist Caroline Eckhardt and some 20 of her students on a 15-year quest: first to Glasgow, Goteborg, and Gottingen in search of the "forthcoming" edition of an unknown chronicle; then, resigned to editing the manuscript herself, to the dictionaries of the medieval world to decipher the 14th-century meaning of such words as "matras" and "wok."
Innovation Boulevard
Last fall, 25-year-old Chris McLean moved his budding Techkor Instrumentation company out of his apartment and into the incubator at Penn State's new Research Park. He might just become Penn State's own Bill and Dave (as in Hewlett and Packard), who started in a shoebox at Stanford. He is, says Fred Meade, director of the Park, "exactly the kind of tenant we're looking for."
From the President: Our Strength and Promise
Outlook: Taking the Scenic Route: The Internet and the Information Superhighway
Encyclopedia:
Life in the Bering Sea
Wood into Coal
Museum of the Environment
Carsick Kids
Movie Matters
A Laissez-Faire
Approach to Brussel Sprouts
Borges, the Labyrinth
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