Yesterday's National Coming Out Day march down Locust Walk gave students a chance to wear their pride on their sleeves - literally. Participants donned pink attire and held hands with members of the same sex as they marched down the Walk

When the birthday cake gets sliced with a sword, you know it's the Navy's special day. The U.S. Navy turns 231 on Friday, and the midshipmen in Penn's Naval ROTC gathered yesterday afternoon in Houston Hall to commemorate the occasion. The flags were presented, anthems were played and a sword was used to do the honors.

Three School of Medicine professors were honored on Tuesday when they were named to the national Institute of Medicine. The institute is part of the National Academy of Sciences, and is a non-profit, non-governmental organization that analyzes and consults on issues related to medicine and health.

The coaching carousel fueled by Fran Dunphy's departure to Temple has finally come to a stop. New Brown coach Craig Robinson filled out his coaching staff by hiring Jesse Agel and former Bears guard Douglas Stewart as assistants. Agel, a 1984 Vermont graduate, was an associate coach for the Catamounts under Tom Brennan for eight years and an assistant for 17 in total.

Penn's Engineering School has a new motto: There is no such thing as too much publicity. Especially when it arrives as rave reviews of a project initially met with skepticism. This month, architecture critics will flock to University City to review Penn's new bioengineering building, Skirkanich Hall.

It would be hard to imagine England without tea, Italy without tomato sauce or Egypt without cotton. But without human intervention, these and other domesticated crops may never have reached the cultures with which they are now associated, according to Paul Gepts.

Veronica Medina knew for many years that she was a lesbian, but was still married with three children until her mid-30s.

When the 1998 Winter Olympics were held in Nagano, Japan, they brought with them a curious sport that quickly caught on as a fad in the United States.

Determining what makes a person a Native American is harder than you might think, according to Bethany Schneider. Schneider, a professor who teaches a graduate-level Native American literature class at Penn, discussed Indian identity at a meeting of Six Directions, a student-run group focusing on Native American issues, yesterday.

In 1904, a French renaissance manor was constructed at 42nd and Pine streets. Over 100 years later, the mansion is re-opening its doors to residents - this time, to anyone who wants to live there. This January, residents will begin moving into the space, which has been transformed into 28 luxury condominiums as part of a project initiated by Penn.

After earlier mishaps two years ago, SPEC seems to have gotten its act together.

Two students have been charged with aggravated assault for allegedly smashing a beer bottle into another student's ear last week.

Ruckus sure has taken off fast. The free online music service, furnished by the Undergraduate Assembly, has 4,100 Penn subscribers not two weeks after its debut, though it has been unofficially available to students for over a month. But it has detractors as well as supporters, and other schools' experiences indicate it risks losing momentum.

Every year, the Penn Relays attract over 15,000 athletes and 100,000 fans to Franklin Field for one of the country's greatest amateur athletic events. For Frank Dolson, a longtime Philadelphia sportswriter who passed away last weekend at age 73, there was little better in the world than the Penn Relays.

WILMINGTON - A third day of deliberations passed yesterday without a verdict in the first-degree murder trial of Wharton undergraduate Irina Malinovskaya, much to the surprise of spectators and lawyers alike.

It was your typical crowd considering the circumstances: 6 p.m. on a Monday in a restaurant that teetered on the edge of Rittenhouse Square, Rouge was about to be flooded with a classy, well-dressed crowd of Center City's clearly sophisticated, pseudo-European crowd.

Penn alum Winnifer Culter might not have made Harvard's list of most influential, but few others have the power to get you lovin'.