Featured Stories Archive – July, 2006
PUPP inspires students on the road to college
By Eric Quiñones · Posted July 31, 2006; 05:23 p.m.
After touring the Chinese art collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Asia Society in New York, students in the Princeton University Preparatory Program (PUPP) were ready to create some Asian-inspired works of their own.
Genetic engineering competition puts students at cusp of new science
By Teresa Riordan · Posted July 27, 2006; 04:06 p.m.
Clusters of students gathered in Princeton's Lewis Thomas Lab on a recent Friday for a trouble-shooting session before heading to their benches for another attempt at something few labs in the world can do: transforming mouse stem cells into muscle cells.
Lessons in nature take wing with Cotsen butterfly program
By Jennifer Greenstein Altmann · Posted July 24, 2006; 03:16 p.m.
Five-year-old Manuel watched intently as Pam Newitt picked up a cabbage white butterfly and placed it on the tip of his mother's nose. "If you have a sweaty nose and you put a butterfly on it, he'll sit there and drink," Newitt explained. Manuel was mesmerized.
Institute fosters excitement about science for teachers
By Eric Quiñones · Posted July 20, 2006; 01:15 p.m.
Class of 1969 internships put Princeton students into service
By Cass Cliatt · Posted July 17, 2006; 04:57 p.m.
Senior Meghan Farrell is among dozens of Princeton students dedicating her time this summer to projects that provide valuable community service while helping to prepare them for the future. Farrell is teaching language arts to inner-city students at the Gesu School in Philadelphia. She spent the earlier part of her summer at another inner-city school in Philadelphia, the Young Scholars Charter School, tutoring and working on a project to help middle school students understand their options for applying to private high schools. Both jobs came to Farrell through a newly expanded summer program administered by the Class of 1969 Community Service Fund.
Ward unravels bacteria’s role in global nitrogen cycle
By Anne Sasso · Posted July 13, 2006; 04:12 p.m.
Bess Ward is a biogeochemist, which is a big-picture way of saying that she does a little bit of everything — biology, geology and chemistry, especially as they relate to the world’s oceans. She studies the nitrogen cycle: the biological and chemical shuffle of nitrogen from soils to oceans to atmosphere and back again. Key to this movement is a host of microorganisms, particularly bacteria or “bugs,” as Ward calls them. In an attempt to better understand which bugs do what where, Ward has collected them from waters all over the world, from Chesapeake Bay to the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Alaska to Antarctica.
Suburbia a rich source of scholarship for Princeton historian
By Denise Barricklow · Posted July 10, 2006; 03:53 p.m.
Growing up in the South, Princeton historian Kevin Kruse was fascinated by the civil rights movement. His interest in the topic led him to his groundbreaking book, “White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism,” published last year by Princeton University Press. It describes how segregationists moved to the suburbs and cast aside their racist demagoguery in favor of a new kind of separatist philosophy that, Kruse argues, led to the ascendancy of the Republican Party and a transformation of American politics.
Tiny transmitters allow researchers to follow flies
By Chad Boutin · Posted July 6, 2006; 03:37 p.m.
On the New Jersey shore, many signs of the changing seasons do not differ greatly from those found elsewhere in the country. V-shaped flocks of geese and twittering masses of songbirds course over the dunes as the migrants head for milder latitudes. But as Princeton’s Martin Wikelski and his research team found out last fall, some other, less-expected travelers are adding their own buzzing chorus to the migration song.
New landscape marks 250th anniversary of Maclean House
By Ruth Stevens · Posted July 3, 2006; 05:28 p.m.
Just in time for the 250th anniversary of its construction, Maclean House has been the focus of some sprucing up. Crews have renovated the landscape and gardens around the house over the past few months, removing some of the overgrown plants that have been there for 50 years and creating new vistas and spaces.