Researchers at Penn's School of Medicine have discovered a major protein related to Lou Gehrig's disease and a type of dementia.

Some are graduate students. Some are middle-aged and balding, their college days long behind them. Others are running for political office, but their T-shirts and moptop hair appear more fit for a Grateful Dead concert than the campaign trail.

Text-messaging may have taken impersonality to the next level in America, but it is literally changing language in China, according to one scholar. Victor Mair, a professor in Penn's East Asian Languages and Civilizations program, along with his colleagues Brian Spooner and Aslam Syed, spoke yesterday afternoon to an audience of about 20 at the Penn Museum on the evolution of language, in both written and spoken forms.

Voters "have to drain the swamp that is Washington, D.C.," Nancy Pelosi told a crowd in Logan Hall's Terrace Room. The Republican Congress has made a mess of everything from Iraq to education, but the Democrats can clean it up, Pelosi (D-Calif.), the U.S. House of Representatives Minority Leader, announced to students Friday morning at a rally on Penn's campus.

The jury in the first-degree murder trial of Wharton undergraduate Irina Malinovskaya deliberated all day on Friday but recessed without reaching a verdict.

While preserving historic buildings is generally popular, a panel yesterday pointed out that it actually may do some harm. This point of view, however, was only one of many presented in a debate hosted by the Penn Urban Studies Center yesterday. The conversation focused on the range of effects of preserving historical areas on communities.

Student government at Penn usually tries to be just that: representation for students.

There just might be life on other planets, according to one astrobiologist. Nobel Prize winner Baruch Blumberg spoke about his field in front of a packed auditorium in Steinberg-Dietrich Hall. Blumberg said that even if life only originated on one planet, it could have moved to others via meteorites.

It may not have access to the precognitive psychics featured in the 2002 Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, but a new city parole force working with Penn's criminology center is trying to prevent potential murderers from killing. Penn's Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, in partnership with the First Judicial District of Philadelphia, is in the process of launching a homicide prevention unit that will try to determine which paroled felons are most likely to commit murder and assign them special parole officers.

Weaving humor through the serious themes of politics and coming of age, poet Daisy Fried charmed an audience that smiled, laughed and applauded as if on queue. Yesterday evening, Fried, who taught writing at Penn three years ago, read selections of her poetry at the Kelly Writers House.

Yale University will make videos of class lectures available to the public on the Internet next fall, the university has announced. The initiative, financed by a private grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, will put class lectures, transcripts, syllabi and other materials from select courses on the Internet for free.

When it comes to leveling the educational playing field, wealth is more important than race, says sociology professor Dalton Conley. Dalton Conley, professor of sociology and public policy at New York University, spoke yesterday in Logan Hall about the relationship between wealth and education to a group of faculty and Graduate School of Education students as part of the "Race in the Academy" series.

Grounds for declaring a mistrial, which would have been the second in the case of Irina Malinovskaya, surfaced on Wednesday, but Judge James Vaughn declined to do so. The judge also rejected a proposal to lessen the charge against Malinovskaya.

Amy Gutmann made $675,000 in her first year as Penn's president, but she's got a long way to go to catch up with her predecessor, who was still on the payroll even though she was not president in that year. Gutmann's total compensation for the fiscal year 2005 - which ended on June 30 of that year - was $675,000 with $92,000 total benefits, tax reports show.

Philadelphia's artists, including Penn's vice provost for University life, will open their doors to the public this weekend. Philadelphia Open Studio Tours is an annual event that allows over 200 of the city's visual artists to open their studios or homes for the display and sale of their artwork.

An obsessed lover who submitted to a fatal attraction, or a confused girl caught up in a situation beyond her control?

Anorexia isn't just a curse of affluent white women in modern America, a Kentucky professor said yesterday. A crowd composed mostly of women gathered in Logan Hall to hear Susan Bordo - a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Kentucky - speak about the changing face of eating disorders.