In certain respects, Ben Eithun is the typical all-American jock - he stands 6 feet 4 inches, weighs 265 pounds and was once a lineman for his football team at Edgewood College. But one thing separates him from the rest of the pack: He is a male nurse.

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.

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.

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.

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

Though graduate students can join three different representative organizations, not all of them are created equal - at least in the eyes of Penn administrators.

Rufus Wainwright may be an acclaimed musician, but even he makes mistakes from time to time.

When students are denied on-campus housing, most quickly scramble to find space off campus.

High-school seniors planning on applying early to college next fall will not have Harvard University as an option - and some say that Harvard's loss could be Penn's gain.

Provost Ron Daniels fulfilled one of his dreams yesterday at the Greek Week trivia bowl in Huntsman Hall - he got to be a fraternity guy.

Musician Masayo Ishigure, who recently contributed to John Williams' 'Memoirs of a Geisha' soundtrack, performs on the koto, a traditional 13-string wooden instrument, at the Penn Museum's Celebrate Japan festival. The festival was a family event featuring performances, exhibits, games and authentic Japanese vendors.

A hypothetical high school senior has a 3.9 GPA and an SAT score of 2230. She is the captain of the volleyball team, a clarinetist and an active participant in both her school yearbook and the debate team.

WILMINGTON, Del. - The jury for Wharton undergraduate Irina Malinovskaya deliberated all day Friday but left for the holiday weekend without coming to a decision.

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.

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

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.