Many students and parents - especially those from low- and moderate-income families - have felt the pain of forking over hundreds of dollars each semester for textbooks that are often underused and difficult to sell back. The Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance found that textbook prices are rising to unaffordable levels and in a report it released last Friday entitled "Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable," the committee offered solutions to this problem.

Almost three weeks after Penn's own commencement exercises, University Provost Ron Daniels had the opportunity to participate in another graduation ceremony across the globe. Last Thursday Daniels delivered a keynote commencement speech at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel.

For rising College senior Gabe Crane, this summer looks like the Huck Finn-style adventure of a lifetime. Crane, along with a recent graduate from Whitman College and two other students from McGill University and Reed College, will be canoeing down the Mississippi River for roughly two months and blogging the entire journey.

What's housed in the orange and green rubik's cube looking building on 40th and Chesnut streets is no longer a puzzle. The building called the Hub houses the posh Jean Madeline Aveda Institute. A bit out of place, but not remotely out of style, this bold architectural modernity is the latest of Penn's efforts in rejuvenating 40th Street, a project that has since included the additions of FreshGrocer and the Bridge Cinema.

Martin Meyerson, Penn's sixth president, died of prostate cancer Saturday at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. He was 84. Meyerson, who served as president from 1970 to 1981, saw Penn through a severe fiscal crisis and set about uniting a sometimes fractious faculty and student body, helping to lay the groundwork for the University's meteoric rise in prestige and in national college rankings under successors Sheldon Hackney and Judith Rodin.

Nancy Streim, associate dean for educational practice at the Graduate School of Education, will be leaving Penn on June 30 to join Columbia University as associate vice president at its Teachers College and special adviser to the Columbia provost. Streim came to Penn in 1988 and has worked closely with the public schools in Phladelphia.

Bob Pierson, the program director of Farm to City, will speak at noon Wednesday on College Green about the importance of supporting local Pennsylvania farmers. Farm to City is a Philadelphia-based organization that, according to its Web site, aims "to unite communities, families and farmers year-round through good locally grown food . and sees a region where the sustainable family farm is economically successful.

Is your cell phone your soul mate? Do you PDA with your PDA? Does your text messaging bill exceed your phone bill? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, you are exactly the kind of person Washington State was targeting when it passed a law May 11 banning people from text messaging or sending e-mails from a handheld communication device while driving.

By Bianca Gonzalez The Summer Pennsylvanian biancag@nursing.upenn.edu You can wake up every morning to breakfast in bed with Joan Osborne's new CD that she promoted recently in Philadelphia. An acclaimed singer-songwriter, Osborne, made an appearance on May 22 at downtown music retailer F.

While Ben Franklin still is Philadelphia's most beloved founding father, excavators in Center City are uncovering some ground-breaking information about a few other patriotic men. The archeological dig at the President's House on 6th and Market streets in Center City that began on March 21 has yielded in recent weeks various artifacts that may give historians unprecedented information about this location.

Positions are hardening and battle lines are being drawn in the ongoing struggle over SEPTA funding. At issue is a $130 million budget shortfall that is threatening the very existence of the transit agency, which is used by about 40,000 students and commuters each day.

Some people love college to death. And now a growing number of colleges and universities have found a never-ending way to return the love. A recent trend has hit higher education, with more and more institutions offering their alumni the opportunity to reside for eternity on campus grounds.

Turns out, you don't have to be a celebrity to give a university commencement address. Penn generally brings in a famed speaker from the outside to send off its graduates: Bono, Kofi Annan, Jodie Foster, James Baker. But Temple University in North Philadelphia doesn't have quite the same tradition and this year, seniors at Temple heard from Kathy Hirsh-Pasek.

Michael Nutter decisively won the Democratic Party's mayoral nomination on May 15, beating out four other candidates in a hotly contested four month-long election. And because Philadelphia hasn't elected a Republican mayor in nearly 60 years, his win against Republican Al Taubenberger in November is seen by many as a foregone conclusion.

The search to find a replacement for departing Wharton Dean Patrick Harker is expected to be announced next month. A search committee is scheduled to announce a selection in June, though Leo Charney, spokesman for the Provost's Office, said that an interim pick from within the school may be selected in lieu of a permanent replacement.

For future generations, toupees and brush-overs may become a thing of the past. Dermatologists from Penn's School of Medicine announced last week that they were able to regenerate hair follicles in laboratory mice - leaving open the possibility that further research could one day remedy male-pattern baldness.

Singing "Happy Birthday" and demanding the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility were on the agenda for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama during his first campaign visit to Philadelphia on Tuesday.