Complimentary lacrosse tickets now available for faculty, staff

Tickets for the Blue Jays 2007 men's lacrosse season will be available beginning today, Feb. 12. To receive two complimentary season passes, faculty and staff members should bring a valid university ID to the main office in the Athletic Center between 8:30 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. Each faculty/staff member is responsible for picking up his or her own tickets. One person will no longer be able to pick up tickets for multiple faculty/staff members.

All full-time students get free admission and must present a valid university ID to pick up their ticket prior to each game. Tickets will be available in the Athletic Center's main office beginning the Monday before each home game, or on game day in the Athletic Center lobby, starting 90 minutes prior to face-off.

Gates to Homewood Field will open 90 minutes before game time.

 

Blood drive and bone marrow registration set for Feb. 14, 15

The next Homewood campus blood drive is scheduled for Valentine's Day and the day after, so organizers are asking members of the Hopkins community to "be a sweetheart" to a sick or injured neighbor in need by donating blood between 8 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 14 or 15 in the Glass Pavilion, Levering Hall.

February's drive, held during Black History Month, also commemorates Charles Drew, the African-American physician and researcher who pioneered blood storage and transfusion techniques and started the first blood bank. As part of that commemoration, faculty, staff and students can address a current need by registering to become bone marrow donors from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the drive. A blood donation is not necessary to register. For information on registering to be a bone marrow donor, go to www.marrow.org.

Blood drive participants and bone marrow registrants will receive a $5 Blockbuster card, a long-sleeved T-shirt, candy hearts and other gifts. To schedule an appointment to donate blood, or for more information, go to www.jhu.edu/~outreach/blooddrive/schedule.html or contact John Black in the Office of Faculty, Staff and Retiree Programs at 410-516-0138.

 

Self-correcting cowlicks? JHU researchers comb for clues

That tuft that won't lie flat with the rest of your hair may have genetic roots. Growing a smooth coat — for mice and probably other furry creatures — requires each hair to sprout from under the skin's surface at similar angles and pointing in the same direction. The gene responsible for saving on styling products is Frizzled-6; mice engineered to lack this gene are covered in cowlicks and whorls. Jeremy Nathans and colleagues in Molecular Biology and Genetics, Neuroscience and Ophthalmology have shown that Frizzled-6 enables each growing hair to make slight adjustments in its orientation with respect to its neighbors to prevent messy hair. If only that could be bottled.

To read their recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, go to www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/103/52/19800.

 

Welch Medical Library launches updated Web site

The Welch Medical Library's Web site, www.welch.jhu.edu, gets a new look this week. The updated interface was designed to streamline the presentation of site content and highlight the evolving nature of the library through information suites.

To ease the transition for users, a link to the earlier interface will remain on the home page for four weeks.

 

McKusick-Nathans scientists help others make sense of proteomics

First came the high-throughput experiments that generated unmanageable amounts of protein-protein interaction data; next came the multitude of publicly available Web-based protein data repositories. How is a bench scientist to know which database to check for information that might help his own research? Akhilesh Pandey and colleagues at Johns Hopkins' McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine and the Institute of Bioinformatics in Bangalore, India, now have published a detailed, systematic analysis of these databases and cataloged their salient features.

The paper is available on the BMC Bioinformatics Web site at: www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/7/S5/S19/abstract.

 

Teddy bears and daffodils on tap for Cancer Society fund-raiser

Daffodil sales to benefit the American Cancer Society, sponsored by the Office of Faculty, Staff and Retiree Programs, are not until mid-March, but advance orders of a special Boyds Bear are being taken through Friday, Feb. 16.

For $25, donors will receive a special keepsake Flowers R. Hope Bear and a bunch of 10 daffodils to support the American Cancer Society's prevention, treatment and patient advocacy efforts. To see the bear, go to: www.jhu.edu/hr/fsrp/daffodil.html.

To order, send a check or money order for $25 payable to JH Daffodils to FSRP, 631-N Wyman Park Building, Homewood campus, attention Matt Smith.

 

Charles Village group seeks JHU recipes for upcoming cookbook

The Charles Village Civic Association is gathering recipes for a soon-to-be-published cookbook and is hoping that favorites from the JHU community will be part of the mix. Sales proceeds will support local causes. Recipes should be sent to gfrench981@aol.com by March 31. For more information, contact Salem Reiner, director of the university's Office of Community Affairs, at sreiner1@jhu.edu.

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