Digest
Daily news about U.Va.: http://www.virginia.edu/topnews

Pocket PCs help students ‘see’ trials
Religious studies professor Benjamin Ray thought it would be handy for his students to have access to the court records of the Salem witch trials for a class he teaches on the subject. Unfortunately, the records consume three volumes and are out of print. The solution? Hand-held PCs, loaded with primary source material. (Top News Daily, Nov. 15-17)

University law professor Anne Coughlin (left) says gender discrimination is often audible when a speaker with ground combat experience is introduced. “At the moment that credential is read, a hush comes over the room. It’s clear that men’s résumés are different from women’s résumés,” she said. Rules that keep women from ground combat are sexist, create a “glass ceiling” for women in the military and are ultimately bound to fall, she recently told an undergraduate women’s studies class. (Top News Daily, Nov. 13)

A research team led by Dr. Dan Theodorescu (right) has discovered a gene that appears to inhibit the deadly spread of cancer throughout a victim’s body — a development that one day may help doctors identify a cancer’s danger of spreading, and perhaps even prevent it from happening at all. The gene RhoGD2 was found in large quantities in localized cancers, but smaller amounts in cancers that had metastasized, or spread.
The results of the study, financed by the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society, are published in the Nov. 15 issue of Cancer Research. (Top News Daily, Nov. 15-17)