It's time to rec and roll
As prime holiday season approaches, the university is just weeks away from unwrapping the latest addition to the Homewood campus, the 63,000-square-foot student recreation center. The three-story $14.3 million facility, intended for the use of Homewood faculty and staff as well as students, is scheduled to open on Jan. 7, 2002.
   For Bill Harrington, recreational sports director, the upcoming opening is a day he thought would never come. As new equipment arrives daily, Harrington says, the smile on his face grows wider.
   "It's gangbusters in here," Harrington says. "It's Bally's, with a college feel," he says, referring to the well-known fitness operation. Full story...

APL team tapped for Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission
NASA has selected a team led by the Applied Physics Laboratory and Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, to develop the first mission to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt region beyond the distant planet.
   The New Horizons: Shedding Light on Frontier Worlds mission team, headed by principal investigator S. Alan Stern of SwRI, also includes Ball Aerospace of Boulder, Colo., Stanford University, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and a variety of other universities and research institutions. Thomas Coughlin is the project manager at APL, which will anage the mission for NASA and design, build and operate the New Horizons spacecraft. SwRI will lead the science team and guide development of the spacecraft's scientific instruments. Ball Aerospace and NASA Goddard will help develop the payload. Full story...

Population loss doesn't always mean urban
Despite conventional wisdom, population loss does not always mean urban decline, according to research by graduate students from the Master of Arts in Policy Studies program at the Institute for Policy Studies. In a recent study of 10 neighborhoods in the city of Baltimore, MAPS students show that the city's dramatic population loss of 12 percent in the last decade can obscure some positive and dynamic signs of health in urban neighborhoods.
   "We certainly saw evidence of a few neighborhoods that were gaining population, as in Bolton Hill, but we also saw examples of neighborhoods that were losing population while doing quite well, such as Ashburton, Canton and Locust Point," said MAPS student Amy Buck, who concluded a resentation of the results given Dec. 4 in Homewood's Levering Hall. Full story...

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