Homecoming came a little early at Penn, at least for former University President Judith Rodin.

What could be worse than midterms? Perhaps having your studying interrupted by your laptop bursting into flames.

A potential amendment to the city smoking ban will most likely not bring drastic change to the local bar scene, area bar owners say.

These guys don't care for activism, and they're taking to the streets to make sure everyone knows it. The pack of students holding cardboard signs and marching down Locust Walk yesterday wasn't protesting genocide in Darfur or the war in Iraq - the students were just protesting the act of protesting.

Mark your calendars: Saturday, Sept. 30, 2017. We don't know who'll be president; it won't be George Bush or whoever succeeds him, even if that person gets two terms. But we do know that Penn will open its Ivy League football schedule hosting Dartmouth that day.

Like many students, Nursing sophomore Jessica Plantulli loves her coffee - especially late at night. But unless she learns to brew her own, getting a latte after 1 a.m. might be a bit of a problem.

The University got more out of its investments this year than in years past, but it has a long way to go to catch up with its Ivy peers.Penn got a 12.5 percent return on its endowment for the fiscal year ending on June 30, an increase of about four percentage points from last year’s returns, officials announced last week.

About halfway through his 7,000-mile voyage across Central Asia, travel writer Colin Thubron found himself in an ironic situation. Stranded in the town of Maimana, Afghanistan, he had decided to catch a ride on a plane carrying refugees. As he boarded the old aircraft, he noticed quizzical looks coming from the other passengers.

Despite not seeing a single snap last season, sophomore cornerback Tyson Maugle is already contributing.

Student descriptions of the alarm going off in the bathrooms in Williams Hall range from a high-pitched wail to lower-pitched beeping. Whatever the exact sound is, students agree: It is disruptive and occurs several times a week. They also say the situation has not changed since the beginning of the semester.

It all begins with a popping or ripping sound, and then the knee suddenly buckles. What follows next is excruciating pain and swelling - all signs of tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in the knee, or ACL.

Under questioning by prosecutors, Wharton undergraduate Irina Malinovskaya broke down on the witness stand yesterday, weeping.

Bucknell football coach Tim Landis is certainly happy to have Andrew Lair on his team, but the circumstances in which the sophomore got there were hardly cause for celebration. Just over a year ago, Lair was in the thick of training camp as a freshman quarterback at the United States Naval Academy.

Larry Gagosian, whom Art Review magazine called "the world's greatest art businessman," never actually planned on getting into the art business. In fact, he'll tell you that in any other business, he would be a "complete flop." Gagosian, the owner of six galleries worldwide, joined 1988 Wharton graduate Glenn Fuhrman in Huntsman Hall yesterday evening for a casual conversation on today's art world.

Avery Lawrence is a College junior from Charlottesville, Va. His e-mail address is lawrence@dailypennsylvanian.com.

Facebook.com has joined the registration trend.The social-networking site joined up with non-partisan political organization Rock the Vote yesterday to begin offering a voter registration page through its Web site. Facebook’s move comes just a week after its competitor, MySpace.

'There ain't no such thing as a free lunch," opines Manuel, a character in Robert Heinlein's science fiction classic The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Since the release of that book in the 1960s, the maxim has become inextricably interwoven with economics. Each year, legions of Penn students have that cliche drilled into their heads when they take Econ 1.