Glass from the past
As the sun rises upon Homewood House, the richness of all available light pours into its front hall by way of a fanlight and sidelights that border one of two main doors to this historic building. Likewise, the glaring light of the setting sun is controlled, and displayed, through a differently designed fanlight and sidelights around a door on the opposite side of the structure. The house, built in 1801, also has unusually large windowpanes, used to capture the sun's rays.
   Light and sparkle were inherent aspects of the neoclassical style, and in the Carroll family's Baltimore home--a house that exemplified this architectural design--glass played an important role.
   Even broken glass served a purpose for the building, as trenches uncovered in archaeological digs in the 1980s were found to contain unusually large quantities of broken wine bottles mixed in with the soil. These types of trenches used glass to help improve drainage away from the house. Full story...

FUSE is open for business
The moment the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer team has been waiting for finally came last week.
   FUSE, they told the American Astronomical Society, is open for business. And since the proof of any new business is in its product, they presented 25 scientific posters filled with tantalizing new data gathered in the orbiting observatory's first few months of activity.
   One highlight, described at a press conference in Atlanta, was new evidence on the origins of a cloud of hot gas that surrounds the Milky Way galaxy, stretching out 5,000-10,000 light-years in a football-shaped halo. Full story...

Teach Baltimore students make gains
Baltimore City elementary students who regularly attended Teach Baltimore, a local summer school program, made significant academic gains this year, says a new Hopkins study.
   Education researcher Geoffrey Borman has released the first-year results of a three-year longitudinal study that tracks the impact of Teach Baltimore, an academically intensive summer program that trains university students to provide eight weeks of summer reading and writing instruction to low-income Baltimore City elementary students. The study involves about 450 elementary school children from five different sites in high-poverty areas of the city.
   Borman, a researcher at Hopkins' Center for Social Organization of Schools, says the results have implications for education policy-makers struggling with issues like year-round schooling, mandatory summer school and preventing what is called the "summer slide effect" for poor children. Full story...

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