At the end of a recent “Medical Microbiology” class taught by Dr. Sheldon Campbell, students clapped, cheered heartily, and stomped their feet on the floor. A couple of them even shouted “Encore!”
It’s not quite the reaction one would expect from medical students who just spent 45 minutes learning about the symptoms and treatments for various vector-borne diseases, but in their case, something unexpected happened. (more…)
One afternoon Nell Meosky ’14 was sitting at a table in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library with her classmates in the undergraduate seminar “Spies, Secrets, and Science.” She eagerly began to leaf through pages of a late medieval text, when an exclamation of “Wait!” by her professor, Paola Bertucci, made her take pause.
The text, Bertucci explained to her students, was the famous Voynich manuscript, an illustrated codex penned in an unknown writing system that has baffled scholars and fired the imaginations of people around the world. Carbon-dated to the early 15th century, the manuscript was acquired by the Beinecke Library in 1969, and Bertucci wanted her students to know that what they were seeing — and touching — is a rare treasure. (more…)
