Earthquake victims in Haiti were terrified once again Wednesday when the country was rocked by a large aftershock. Why do we have aftershocks? According to Temple University Earth and Environmental Science professor Jonathan Nyquist, earthquakes typically occur along tectonic plate boundaries—as the plates slide against each other, they will catch and lock, pressures build, and something will snap and you'll have an earthquake. "Imagine taking a plastic wrapper or cellophane in your hand and crumpling it up, but little crinkling sounds continue for a while afterwards and that little crinkling, those smaller shocks afterwards, is still the plates settling in after the initial break."

January 20, 2010 | New York Times

There are indications that Starbucks’ turnaround efforts are working. On Wednesday, the company reported that in the first quarter, which included the important holiday season, net income was $241.5 million, up from $64.3 million in the year-ago quarter. But even if Howard D. Schultz, Starbucks’ chief executive, still sees the company through an entrepreneur’s eyes, it is no longer a start-up and its stores are not local coffeehouses. “That kind of resonance it had at one point is going to be hard to recapture,” said Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple University and author of a book about Starbucks titled Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks. “It’s his own sense of the brand overtaking what’s doable right now.”

January 20, 2010 | City Paper

It was, in the end, much ado about nothing. City Councilman Jack Kelly filed a defamation lawsuit against one of his constituents in 2008 and he lost. For a public official to win a defamation suit, he or she not only has to prove that the allegedly defamatory statement was inaccurate, and that the person making the statement knew it was inaccurate, but that it was done with malice — an intentional effort to inflict harm. "There's no bar to a politician suing for defamation," says Mark Rahdert, a constitutional law professor at Temple University. "Just like any other individual, he or she can do so. The standard, however, is a pretty steep one."

January 20, 2010 | FOX News

China's scanning of text messages for vulgar content is causing fears among experts that the country's government is just using it as an excuse to further filter or censor cyber content. Preventing the spread of pornography is a common thread in China's censorship, explains Abbe Foreman, a professor with the computer and information science department at Temple University's College of Science and Technology. "They've been doing this type of censorship for some time," she said, adding that "5,000 people in China were arrested on pornography charges last year. I'm guessing they found them all through some sort of censorship program."