The Wesleyan Connection

Wesleyan sports fans can view play-by-play action of their favorite events through Wesscores, a new service hosted on Twitter.

Twitter is a popular social networking and “microblogging” service used to communicate timely information as well as exchange quick, frequent messages with others. The short Twitter messages, referred to as the “tweets,” can be viewed on a web browser or cell phone as text messages.

The Athletics Department at Wesleyan has created a Twitter account called wescores to send updated sports information and is inviting all the Cardinals fans to follow this account on twitter by visiting the URL http://twitter.com/wescores and clicking on the follow button.

“This is a great way to quickly circulate sports scores to sports fans who cannot be at the game live, or are not near a computer,” says Brian Katten, Wesleyan’s sports information director.

The service debuted for the men’s lacrosse (more…)

Four Wesleyan student-athletes visited the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation during Spring Break. (Photo courtesy of ESYHF)

Four Wesleyan athletes traveled to Philadelphia in early March to spend the first weekend of their spring break speaking to underprivileged girls about the importance of staying in school and pursuing higher education.

The event was organized through the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation (ESYHF), a non-profit organization founded by Ed Snider, owner of the Philadelphia Flyers, to use the sport of hockey to educate young people on how to succeed in the game of life.

ESYHF provides after-school hockey, life skills, and educational programming at no cost to the most disadvantaged communities in the Greater Philadelphia Region. (more…)

At left, Scott Martin, superintendent of PAC Group LLC in North Haven, Conn. discusses floor plans with Alan Rubacha, construction services consultant, inside the former Davenport Campus Center on March 16.The building is undergoing an interior remodeling project and will re-open as The Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life for the Fall 2009 semester.

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Kit Reed, resident writer in the English Department, is the author of Enclave, published by TOR Books on Feb. 3. In this gripping dystopian satire, ex-marine Sargent Whitmore has a plan to make millions while protecting children from the self-destructing modern world. He turns an old Mediterranean monastery into a combined impenetrable fortress and school, and enrolls 100 filthy-rich children, most of them already well-known for legal troubles, drug problems and paparazzi run-ins. Once there, everyone is cut off from the outside world, fed only canned news stories about wars and natural disasters. When things inevitably go horribly wrong, young hacker “Killer” Stade, physician assistant Cassie, drug and sex-crazed Sylvie and monastery-raised orphan Benny all attempt heroics, but remain deeply flawed. Reed displays unflinching willingness to explore all the facets of all of the characters, and her refusal to paint anyone as a simple villain makes this far more than a typical disaster novel.

Reed speaks about her book in an online interview here.

Celtic Melody, an Irish traditional music band, performed for Wesleyan faculty, staff and students March 13 inside the Usdan University Center in honor of St. Patrick's Day.

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Mary-Jane Rubenstein, assistant professor of religion, assistant professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, is the author of the book, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, published by Columbia University Press, March 2009. Strange Wonder confronts Western philosophy’s ambivalent relationship to the Platonic “wonder” that reveals the strangeness of the everyday. On the one hand, this wonder is said to be the origin of all philosophy. On the other hand, it is associated with a kind of ignorance that ought to be extinguished as swiftly as possible. By endeavoring to resolve wonder’s indeterminacy into certainty and calculability, philosophy paradoxically secures itself at the expense of its own condition of possibility.

Chisel of Remembrance by Vera Schwarcz.

Vera Schwarcz, the Mansfield Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies, chair of the East Asian Studies Proggram, professor of history, professor of East Asian studies, is the author of Chisel of Remembrance, a new collection of poems that draws from roots in Jewish, Chinese, and other ancient traditions. The 76-page book of poetry was published from Antrim House Books.

Schwarcz will read from and sign copies of Chisel of Remembrance at 8 p.m. March 31 in Russell House. The reading is free and a reception will follow.

When parasites attack woolly bear caterpillars, such as this Grammia incorrupta, the insects eat leaves loaded with chemicals called alkaloids, which seems to cure the infection. The discovery, by Michael Singer, represents the first clear demonstration of self-medication among bugs.

Michael Singer, assistant professor of biology, is the author of “Self-Medication as Adaptive Plasticity: Increased Ingestion of Plant Toxins by Parasitized Caterpillars,” published in PLoS ONE, March 2009. PLoS ONE is an open access, online scientific journal from the Public Library of Science.

This new article rigorously demonstrates that caterpillars can self-medicate, following up on a previous publication in Nature in 2005. This is the first experimental demonstration of self-medication by an invertebrate animal.

This paper also represents the first publication to arise from research funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant awarded to Singer in December 2007. Kevi Mace BA ’07 MA ’08 assisted with the research.

The research also was featured in an article titled “Woolly Bear, Heal Thyself,” published in Discover Magazine online, and in an article titled “Woolly Bear Caterpillars Self-Medicate — A Bug First,” published in National Geographic News.  The caterpillars also were mentioned in the March 26, 2009 edition of nature-research-highlights-09.

Neuroscience of Birdsong.

John Kirn, chair and professor of neuroscience and behavior, professor of biology, director of Graduate Studies, is the co-author of a book chapter titled “Regulation and function of neuronal replacement in the avian song system.”

The chapter is published inside the book Neuroscience of Birdsong, released in 2009 by Cambridge University Press.

The book provides a comprehensive summary of birdsong neurobiology, and identifies the common brain mechanisms underlying this achievement in both birds and humans. Written primarily for advanced graduates and researchers, there is an introductory overview covering song learning, the parallels between language and birdsong and the relationship between the brains of birds and mammals; subsequent sections deal with producing, processing, learning and recognizing song, as well as with hormonal and genomic mechanisms.

The book was featured in Science Magazine in February 2009 in an article titled “Neuroscience: Singing in the Brain.”

The Green Street Arts Center received a grant worth $10,000 from Citizens Bank and the Citizens Bank Foundation to support the Community Mural Project, an 18 month-long art program that will culminate in a large public mural, to be installed in the spring of 2009 on the corner of Main and Green Streets in the North End of Middletown. Led by mural artist Marela Zacarias, the project’s participants are a diverse group of Middletown children, their families, professional artists, Wesleyan students, and other community members.