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Nourishing the brain with conversations about food
Two people standing next to a marble staircase, with stands and a sphinx blurry in the background.

Penn archaeologist Megan Kassabaum (left) and biocultural anthropologist Morgan Hoke organized the series on food taking place at the Penn Museum on Mondays. During the fall semester, academics from nine institutions spoke on a range of topics, from food as life sustaining to how pizza and sushi gained their prominence. Spring semester, the talks have turned inward, focusing on the research happening across the University.

Nourishing the brain with conversations about food

A yearlong colloquium from Penn Anthropology offers a steady diet of research perspectives, delving into how this facet of culture affects modern health and practices, and broadens our historical outlook.

Michele W. Berger

Campus orchard grows, with help from the community
emptying dirt from wheelbarrow with city in the background

Campus orchard grows, with help from the community

Now five years old, the Penn Park Orchard is expanding, literally and figuratively. With shovels and sweat equity, members of the University contributed to those efforts at a workday.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Crowdsourcing 10,000 years of land use
A brown cow standing in a mountain landscape in the Italian Alps.

To predict what will happen in the future, its important to understand what happened in the past. Thats the idea behind ArchaeoGLOBE, a project that looks at land use around the world—like in the Italian Alps, seen here—during the past 10,000 years. (Photo courtesy: Lucas Stephens) 

Crowdsourcing 10,000 years of land use

More than 250 archaeologists from around the world contributed their knowledge to ArchaeoGLOBE, an effort to better understand the prevalence of agriculture, pastoralism, and hunting and gathering at different points in human history.

Michele W. Berger

Where ethics, welfare, and sustainability meet swine
pigs in large stalls at new bolton center

Where ethics, welfare, and sustainability meet swine

At New Bolton Center’s model pig farm, free-roaming sows are implanted with RFID chips, nourished by organic feed, and powered by solar energy.

Gina Vitale

The ‘off’ button that lets plants make flowers
Scanning electron microscope image of plant parts. Main image is covered in spikes, smaller one looks smoother and less complex.

AA 10-day-old Arabidopsis seedling displayed no defect in forming new organs (main image), unless they lacked the key genes MP, ETT, and ARF4. In that case, a small stubby plant (inset) that cannot form new organs is the result. (Image: Wagner lab)

The ‘off’ button that lets plants make flowers

Flowers aren’t just pretty to look at; without them, plants couldn’t reproduce. Investigating the critical process of flower formation in plants, School of Arts and Sciences biologist Doris Wagner and colleagues discovered how a key gene is shut off in order for blooms to form. “Identity is not just what you are; it’s what you aren’t,” she says.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Keeping campus trees—all 6,800 of them—healthy and vibrant
Looking down on campus through a variety of colorful treetops, people walk by holding umbrellas

The changing foliage of Penn’s trees make even a gray and rainy day look bright. Campus staff take a proactive approach to maintaining the trees’ health.

Keeping campus trees—all 6,800 of them—healthy and vibrant

Caring for the trees on Penn’s campus—an official arboretum since last year—is no small undertaking. Staff from Facilities and Real Estate Services and the Morris Arboretum lead the way in ensuring that the University’s trees remain safe, vibrant, diverse, and beautiful.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Dry conditions may have helped a new type of plant gain a foothold on Earth
Pots on a table in a greenhouse filled with grasses in various stages of growth

Biochemical and paleoclimate modeling revealed that plants with a new photosynthetic pathway known as C4, present in several important crop species today, emerged when atmospheric carbon dioxide was still quite high, roughly 30 million years ago. Water limitations, rather than Co2, drove its initial spread, a Penn-led team found.

Dry conditions may have helped a new type of plant gain a foothold on Earth

Plants reap energy from the sun using two photosynthesis pathways, C3 and C4. A new study led by Haoran Zhou, Erol Akçay and Brent Helliker suggests that water availability drove the expansion of C4 species, which may help to explain how different plant lineages came to be distributed on the planet today.

Katherine Unger Baillie

How plants cope with stress
an irrigation field with minimal crops growing

Irrigated crops can grow with less water but are typically subject to increased salts leached out of the surrounding soil, which can put a dent in productivity. A new study led by Penn biologists has uncovered a way plants respond to salt stress—a pathway that could be manipulated to engineer more tolerant crops.

How plants cope with stress

With climate change comes drought, and with drought comes higher salt concentrations in the soil. Brian Gregory and graduate student Stephen Anderson have identified a mechanism by which plants respond to salt stress, a pathway that could be targeted to engineer more adaptable crops.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Can changing our diets save the planet?
hamburger bun stuffed with lettuce and no burger

Can changing our diets save the planet?

Brian Berkey and Karen Glanz discuss how dietary changes could impact the overall health of the planet, following the United Nations’ recent report on climate change.

Penn Today Staff