Penn is Making History -- every day

Lessons of A Robot: Building Smarter Engineering at Penn

You have to see it to believe it:

A robot, puttering along, gets clobbered -- its parts scattering in all directions -- and then begins to reassemble itself.

     watch on YouTube | nytimes.com

This ability -- to design something that reassembles itself, on the fly, in order to do the best job -- is a specialty of Mark Yim, the Gabel Family Term Junior Professor in Penn's Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics. It's also a product of Penn's GRASP Lab (General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception Lab), a truly interdisciplinary research center focused on robotics, vision, perception, control, automation and learning.

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State of the Art: Penn Photography Students On Their First Grand Tour

This spring, a dozen PennDesign students took their first "grand tour" -- not of Europe, but of Beijing, China, where they spent two weeks "in pursuit of an image": exploring, through photography, "the contradictions and significance of China's radically shifting contemporary cultural climate."

It was the University's first-ever "studio abroad" opportunity for photography students, made possible by the new Howard A. Silverstein and Patricia Bleznak Silverstein Photography Program.

Prior to their departure, the students -- an even mix of grads and undergrads -- immersed themselves in Chinese language, history, and culture, while honing their conceptual targets and photojournalistic strategies. Once in Beijing, they spent their time traveling and shooting for an assigned research project.

Back at Penn, students displayed their work in an exhibit called "East West South North," now on view with an accompanying catalog through June 26 at the Charles Addams Fine Arts Gallery.

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Penn Medicine's Emmy-Winning Film Puts Alzheimer's Disease on Prime Time

"Americans should see this film, their jaws should drop and they should quake in their boots," says Dr. John Q. Trojanowski, Director of Penn's Institute on Aging.

Terminator 4? Monsters vs. Aliens?

No, something more dramatic -- and real: Alzheimer's Disease: Facing the Facts.

Facing the Facts, which premiered on PBS in January and won a regional Emmy® in May, is a hard-hitting documentary conceived by Trojanowski to deliver a powerful wake-up call: America's ever-growing Alzheimer's population threatens to overwhelm both the health care system's ability to care for these patients and the country's ability to pay.

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Penn Slam-Poet Joshua Bennett: "On a First-Name Basis With the Wind"

If you've ever been curious about what Amy Gutmann means when she says that Penn students have the potential to "improve the world in bolder, more unpredictable ways", then listen (up!) to this.

Penn junior and "slam champ" Joshua Bennett performed live last week in the East Room of the White House -- and received a standing ovation from President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and about 200 guests.

It was the first-ever White House "Poetry Jam" -- an evening of poetry, music, and spoken word that included legendary actor James Earl Jones (who read passages of Othello), writers Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, jazz pianist Eric Lewis, and spoken word performer Mayda Del Valle.

As one of those voices, Joshua rose to the occasion with a particularly fitting piece: "Tamara's Opus," an original poem about his own struggle to communicate with his deaf sister.

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A Literary Treasure Hunt: Gotham Book Mart in Boxes

220,000 books fill a lot of boxes -- 3800 to be exact. These towers of boxes contain all of the books that once graced the five floors of New York's storied Gotham Book Mart, one time hangout of literary giants like John Updike and J.D. Salinger.

Through the generosity of an anonymous donor, the University of Pennsylvania acquired this splendid collection in December, 2008.

But what, exactly, is in those boxes?

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