Homosexual Student Sent Threats to Self

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, Aug. 24—Campus police officers at the College of New Jersey arrested the man responsible for sending death threats to Edward Drago, an openly homosexual student. The student responsible for the messages was Drago, himself, the Chronicle for Higher Education reported.

Neither the police nor campus officials would comment on whether Drago voluntarily confessed, but he told reporters, “I was called in for routine questioning and confessed because I felt it was the right thing to do. There were a lot of times when I wanted to break down and be honest before then, but that usually led to a panic attack or a seizure.”

Drago attributed his actions to his own instability and his ambivalence about being homosexual, the Chronicle reported. Drago was charged with a felony or filing false police reports. He faces harassment charges for threats sent to the homosexual group on campus.

Harvard to Harvest Stem Cells From Fertility-Clinic Embryos

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, Aug. 27—Harvard University will use leftover embryos from the nation's largest fertility clinic to create new stem-cell lines, which the university would then offer free to any scientist, reported the Chronicle for Higher Education. The deal would make Harvard one of the top stem-cell providers in the world, but research on those stem cells would not be eligible for federal funds under President Bush's new policy, noted the education newspaper.

Douglas A. Melton, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard, was instrumental in securing the deal, reported the Chronicle. Melton's other employer, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a private foundation, will pay Boston IVF $180,000 over the next two years to cover the cost of transferring the embryos.

Harvard will receive no money in the deal. Harvard officials said they did not know how many new lines would arise from the new arrangement.

“We believe in what we're doing,” said Javier Balloffet, director of administration for Harvard's biological laboratories.

Universe Not a Void, Notre Dame Profs Prove

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME, Aug. 27—Two University of Notre Dame physicists are involved in the discovery of a fundamental difference between matter and its mirror image, antimatter—a finding that helps explain why the universe is not a giant void.

In 1981, Notre Dame physics professor Ikaros Bigi wrote a paper with Anthony Ichiro Sanda and Ashton Carter that predicted the properties that certain particles would have if the so-called Standard Model of the fundamental forces of nature was correct.

This July, two separate research facilities, one in Stanford, Calif., and the other in Japan, demonstrated the predicted results. John LoSecco, a professor of physics at Notre Dame, was also involved in the discovery.

The new findings give the best reasons to date for explaining, when the universe blossomed into being in the big bang roughly 13 billion years ago, the matter that had been created was not obliterated by an equal amount of antimatter.