Hot-off-the-presses is not usually a part of lesson plans in university classrooms - unless it is. History, political science, economics... social sciences and humanities classtime can easily and sometimes should be convulsed in topical isses. Faculty at institutions in the immediate area don't have the luxury of remove and often need to incorporate the events for multiple reasons. The Chronicle of Higher Education shares some lessons plans from faculty in the St. Louis area and how they plan to address sensitive issues of race and policing that were ignitied on Aug. 9.

A major advance from researchers in the department of genetics:

A team of scientists including researchers from the University of Georgia have grown a fully functional organ from scratch in a living animal for the first time.

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If you had to learn to speak Italian or Spanish with only a dictionary, could you do it? Phonemes are distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat. So... consonants are one thing, but vowels can be a completely different story. You have to love this stuff and our Romance Languages faculty does. On Thursday at 4 p.m.

The Hugh Hodgson School of Music revs up the fall semester with the first concert in the 2nd Thursday Scholarship Concert Series on Thursday Sept. 11, with a new start time at 7:30 p.m.:

Pianist Damon Denton will appear as featured soloist with the University of Georgia Symphony Orchestra on Sept. 11 in Hodgson Concert Hall.

Of the twelve University of Georgia students who were awarded international travel-study grants from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program for the 2014-2015 academic year, the Franklin College is well represented:

This is UGA's second highest total of Fulbright recipients.

The 5,285 freshmen who entered UGA this week, assembled into a Super G on Sunday in Sanford Stadium as part of the Freshman Welcome to the Class of 2018 sponsored by the Student Government Association and the Student Alumni Council. 

That's a lot of people - normally, you would have to be crossing 42nd Street and 7th Ave to see that many people in one place.

News and current events today challenge us to be able to see the world from the persepctive of others. The more insulated we become - socially, economically, politically - the more difficult it can be to understand the broader issues and events swirling around us. Of course, an education steeped in the humanities can go a long way towards making us better people, better citizens who can relate to our fellow citizens constructively, who want to understand, who can access solutions outside of our own personal interest, experience or perspective.

The D.W. Brooks mall on South Campus is about to [begin to] change for the better, with much-needed science instruction space in the new Science Learning Center:

The University of Georgia will break ground on its newest building-the 122,500-square-foot Science Learning Center-on Aug. 26 at 11:30 a.m. at the south end of the S10 parking lot located just off Carlton Street.

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What are we doing to the planet? Is that even an accurate formulation? In the great words of Tonto, what do you mean 'we'? Humans are of the Earth, and yet at the same time our impact on it has been a great force, often working against it.

Some great plain talk on school reform from Franklin College alumnus and Clarke Central High School literature teacher Ian Altman in the Washington Post:

7. Don’t tell us to leave politics out of the classroom.