Peter Fielding's roommate is spending the semester in Ireland, and he's keeping his pals back at Penn up-to-date on his escapades. He sends out periodic e-mails highlighting his adventures, addressed to a few of his closest friends. Except Fielding.

Bowing to pressure from student critics, student-government leaders will halt work on a program intended to track voter demographics in student elections. The program would have gathered such information as gender, race, college house, international student status and major.

A small but enthusiastic audience at the Kelly Writers House got to learn what it takes to turn a book into art Saturday. Sandra Kroupa, book arts curator at the University of Washington Libraries, spoke about the challenges facing book artists and librarians involved in "book arts," using pictures, bindings, special paper and other materials to make books more than chunks of text.

At $43,360, the cost of one year at Amherst College is nearly five times Yasmin Navarro's family's annual income of $9,000. But fortunately for Navarro, a freshman at the Massachusetts liberal arts college, Amherst is covering the full cost of tuition, room and board, and even books.

Crotchety old science professors are becoming a rarer breed, at least for students in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. In the last five years alone, Penn's Engineering School has made a total of 35 new hires, and over half of Engineering faculty were hired within the last eight years, according to Engineering School Dean Eduardo Glandt.

Penn Medicine Radiology professor Marc Levine has received an Eminent Scientist of the Year Award 2006 from the International Research Promotion Council, based in India. Levine, both a clinician and a researcher, received the award for his research in gastrointestinal radiology, a field in which he has co-authored and published about 300 pieces of literature.

Psychiatry professor emeritus Aaron Beck has been selected to receive the 2006 Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research. The Lasker Awards are the nation's most distinguished honor for basic and medical research and are sometimes called "America's Nobels," in reference to the prestigious Nobel Prizes that are given in Stockholm, Sweden, every year.

China Okasi, a Penn Graduate School of Education alumna, was always the one friends and family turned to for help with an essay, whether by knocking on her dorm-room door or meeting for a tutoring session at the Weingarten Learning Resources Center in Stouffer Commons.

It's one of the most valuable and unique pieces in Penn's art collection, but chances are you've never even heard of it, let alone noticed it tucked away in a corner of Van Pelt Library's first floor. Penn's Rittenhouse Orrery is a model of the solar system, complete with accurately moving planets, and is as precise as was possible in the late 18th century, according to Bob Koch, a retired astronomy professor who has researched the orrery.

"Ready. Set. Vote." This is the catchphrase of Pennsylvania's instructional voting video, produced by the state government in an effort to minimize woes at state voting booths Nov. 7. In May's primary, 200 machines jammed, leaving voters at certain sites with only one machine to use, Chris Sheridan, public-policy director for the Philadelphia political watchdog group Committee of Seventy, said.

Facebook.com may soon be sold to Yahoo for about $1 billion, according to an article published last week in The Wall Street Journal. The companies are in serious discussions over the sale of the site, founded by former Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, the Journal reported.

WILMINGTON, Del. - Irina Malinovskaya admitted to police that she was outside the apartment where the body of Irina Zlotnikov was found on the day of her murder, according to a taped interrogation shown in court on Friday.

Karma was a key word yesterday during Wharton undergraduate Irina Malinovskaya's trial, but not in the cosmic sense. Instead, prosecutors called to the stand experts in animal DNA testing that provided testimony about hairs found in Malinovskaya's rental car.

According to one Penn professor, the American government - not extremist groups like al-Qaeda - is to blame for the war on terror. Professor Ian Lustick asks whether the U.S.'s current conflict is necessary in his new book, Trapped in the War on Terror, which was presented to an audience of about 30 at the Penn Bookstore yesterday.

A suspicious package outside the Quadrangle prompted police to evacuate the Upper Quad and Stouffer College House last night. The Philadelphia bomb squad determined with an X-ray that the package was safe, however, and no one was injured. At about 7 p.m.

When Bob Schoenberg started working at Penn's Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Center in 1982, a student in Gregory College House had just been beaten up in a violent incident of homophobia. Yesterday afternoon, as the LGBT Center officially opened a state-of-the-art "Cyber Center" in the Carriage House on Spruce Street, Schoenberg, now the director of the organization, said Penn had made great progress over the past 25 years.