An unprecedented Success
Back in the late 1960s, when Robert Slavin and Nancy Madden were undergraduates at Reed College in Portland, Ore., they used to spend hours and hours talking about school reform.
   "Ah, the 'walking in the rain' story," Madden says with a slightly theatrical sigh as she and Slavin, her husband, tell the story of Success for All, one of the largest and most successful research-based school reform models in the country today.
   "We met in college, and yeah, we'd walk around in the rain and talk about our school reform," she explains. "We got our first grant in 1970, one summer during college, and we hired a staff and we developed the core of World Lab, which is still part of the program now. It was a science and social studies-based curriculum designed to actively engage kids not achieving in school." Full story...

Human embryonic stem cells cultured
A team of scientists has isolated and identified human stem cells and proved them capable of forming the fundamental tissues that give rise to distinct human cells such as muscle, bone and nerve. This feat has for decades been one of basic science's holy grails, and while scientists have found stem cells in mice and higher animals, this is believed to be the first time researchers have cultured human embryonic stem cells.
   "The potential of these unique, versatile cells for human biologic studies and medicine is enormous," says John Gearhart (pictured at right), a professor of obstetrics/gynecology and of physiology, who led the mostly Hopkins research team. "These cells will rapidly let us study human processes in a way we couldn't before. Instead of having to rely on mice or other substitutes for human tissues, we'll have a unique resource that we can start applying to medicine." Full story...

APL-developed device takes John Glenn's temperature in space
It came from space, and now it's returned to space--that's the strange itinerary of a unique device that lies in John Glenn's belly continuously taking his temperature as he orbits the Earth aboard space shuttle Discovery.
   As part of his medical experiments, Senator/astronaut Glenn swallowed a 3/4-inch-long, silicone-coated capsule that contains a tiny telemetry system, a microbattery and a quartz temperature sensor. These devices had their roots in the work of spacecraft scientists at the Applied Physics Laboratory as they invented Transit, the world's first navigation-by-satellite system, more than three decades ago.
   Later, when APL biomedical scientists, working on a shoestring $75,000 NASA grant, were asked to develop a device that could be swallowed by astronauts as a way to measure their core body temperature, they borrowed technology from their space colleagues to invent the ingestible temperature capsule. Full story...

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