Heads up! The brain behind the acclaim
As the "decade of the brain" draws to a close, the human brain continues to be one of the great frontiers of modern science, as full of tantalizing questions and baffling puzzles as the depths of interstellar space.
   Despite its complexity and depth, though, the brain has very modest beginnings.
   "In the developing fetus, the brain essentially starts out as a bag of undifferentiated cells," says Anirvan Ghosh, an assistant professor of neuroscience. "They're just basically dividing and occupying the space where the brain will be." Full story...

Civility explored behind prison walls
Last week, when a group of Hopkins professors and undergraduates made their way through careful security checks, past endless coils of razor wire, through the chilly night and into the maximum security prison, then through more checks and head counts and past the staring eyes of hundreds of convicts, the topic of the discussion group they were about to participate in--civility--was beginning to seem a little, well, sketchy.
   And yet, when they arrived at the activity room of the Maryland Correctional Institute in Jessup, where a dozen inmates greeted the Hopkins Civility Project group with warm handshakes and an earnest enthusiasm for the discussion about to take place, all the metal detectors, razor wire and head counting began to seem strangely remote. Full story...

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