In her "Time to…" column for the Inquirer, Eva Monheim of Temple's Department of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture offered timely design and maintenance tips for gardens and homes. Her advice for November: Trim evergreen hedges, make a checklist for trees and shrubs that need pruning and create indoor arrangements around doorways. Monheim also explained how to build a "cold frame" from hay bales to protect a winter garden from the wind.

Temple student Alex Chappel says a flyer about a Temple weight loss study changed her life. Chappel signed up for the Healthy Owls study and began receiving personalized text messages and visiting a private Facebook page that featured videos on how to eat right and exercise. She says the texts helped her lose about 20 pounds during the study, and what she learned helped her lose an additional 30 pounds after the study ended.

Jennie Shanker, a sculptor and an instructor at Temple's Tyler School of Art, is turning Marcellus Shale into coffee cups. Shanker is working with the shale — a source of natural gas extracted through a controversial process known as fracking — in order to bring the issues associated with the rocks down to a more personal level. "By making a cup, it puts the whole situation in direct relation to…your body," she said. "You have to decide, is it safe to drink this stuff?" The cups are on display at Temple Gallery.

An exhibit which spotlights the role of New Jersey troops in the Civil War opens Sunday in Morristown, New Jersey, in honor of the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Gettysburg. "The whole point of displaying these artifacts and mementos is to recall the service of those veterans and evoke the passion for their deeds so they won't be forgotten and we can learn from the past," said Anthony Waskie, a Civil War historian and assistant professor of languages at Temple.