If your son attends a college rife with guns and drugs, you shouldn't have to pay full freight. That seems to be the thinking behind one father's alleged attempt to blackmail the dean of students at Harcum College, a two-year institution in Bryn Mawr, Pa.

When the father, Vincent Guadini, himself an alumnus of Harcum, received a bill for $3,000 in unpaid dorm fees for his son Michael, he allegedly e-mailed the dean asking him to waive the fees in return for Mr. Guadini's silence about drugs and guns on the campus, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports. Fox News reports that county officials found the accusations about the college to be false. Mr. Guadini, a former police officer, now faces counts of extortion, attempted theft, and other...

As 2009 neared its end, writers and journalists began scrambling to name the decade. The New York Times weighed in, as did Slate, and The New Yorker, and probably several other publications that we subscribe to but never find time to read.

The American Historical Association asked its members for suggestions, and this week it listed the nominees and asked readers to vote on a...

A chemistry lecturer at Northwestern University plucks a feathered intruder from the classroom:

Via ChemistryBlog

From our in box, a press release from a tobacco-retailers group that assails a peer-reviewed health study and argues that, essentially, a smoking pipe is no smoking gun:

Premium Cigar Group Labels Columbia Study as Corrupt Misuse of Junk Science

Columbus, Georgia March 3, 2010 — Conclusions made by a new study of cigar and pipe smoking by researchers at the Columbia University Medical Center are not supported by the study’s findings, says the International Premium Cigar & Pipe Retailers Association, a not-for-profit group of premium cigar retailers and manufacturers.  

The study, published last month in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was funded primarily by grants from the National Heart,...

Tens of millions of disabled people in developing countries who need wheelchairs don’t have them, and many of those with wheelchairs own models that aren’t versatile enough to use both indoors and on rugged terrain. Amos G. Winter’s new creation, the "leveraged freedom chair," might ease those problems. 

Mr. Winter, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, built...

Austin Sendek, a physics student at the University of California at Davis, has proposed that the California slang word "hella" be approved as a new prefix to describe 10²⁷, according to a report by Physics World.

A Facebook page in support of Mr. Sendek's effort had attracted more than 23,000 fans as of this writing.

The International Committee for Weights and Measures added "yotta" (10²⁴⁾ and "zetta" (10²¹⁾ to the International System of Units in 1991. 

Ian Mills, the University of Reading chemist who presides over the Consultative Committee for Units, an advisory body to the weights and measures...

Last month the Yale Daily News ran a five-part series on students' sex lives, using pie charts and bar graphs to depict such things as the frequency of couplings (and soloings) on the campus. Now the Yale College dean's office is inviting students to submit anonymous essays about their campus sexual experiences for a new online collection called "sex@Yale," the student newspaper reports.

Melanie Boyd, director of undergraduate studies in women’s gender and sexuality studies and the dean's special adviser on gender issues, told the...

In our continuing coverage of people not likely to be invited to a college campus to speak on ethics, we are thrilled to report that the former Illinois governor Rod R. Blagojevich will speak on Tuesday at Northwestern University. The event is titled "Ethics in Politics: An evening with Former Governor Rod Blagojevich."

Mr. Blagojevich, you might recall, awaits trial on federal corruption charges for his role in trying to profit from his power to appoint a successor to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama. He was removed from office last year.

The College Democrats are sponsoring his visit.

We've all seen advertisements that depict the ugly consequences of alcohol abuse — a smashed-up car, a drunk making a fool of himself, the chalk outline of a pedestrian on the pavement.

Those anti-drinking ads, according to a new study, can actually trigger a defensive coping mechanism that permits people to mentally distance themselves from the serious consequences of drinking too much. And that causes them to drink even more.

"Advertisements are capable of bringing forth feelings so unpleasant that we're compelled to eliminate them by whatever means possible," said Adam Duhachek, an Indiana University marketing professor and co-author of the study. "This motivation is sufficiently strong to...