Temple will open a historic church as a new multi-use space next month, after a $30 million renovation. In its day, the Baptist Temple, which opened in the 1880s on North Broad Street, hosted the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., Helen Keller and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Prior to the renovation, the massive stone building had been dormant for 30 years, with a leaky roof and rotting floors. Today, the exterior looks much as it did in its heyday. But the inside has been transformed into a modern theater — suitable for concerts, plays and live performances, but also for speeches, corporate meetings and social functions. "It was not restored. It’s a renovation. It’s been re-tasked, blending the old with the new," said Charles Henry Bethea, executive director of the Baptist Temple.

March 12, 2010 | Science News

To get toddlers to learn new information from educational television shows or DVDs, don't bribe them or bully them — just trick them. One way to teach young children with video is to convince them that what they see on the screen is as real as anything they encounter in person, new research shows. "Under normal circumstances, television and videos may be so captivatingly interesting to young children that they have difficulty learning from these media,” said Temple psychologist Sarah Roseberry. In the experiment, overcoming that obstacle hinged on youngsters believing that researchers could turn stuffed animals into real animals by putting the toys inside a "magic Sesame Machine," she said.

March 12, 2010 | Seattle Times

This year's Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition had so many promising business plans that picking winners proved difficult. So judges did something unusual: they ponied up their own money on the spot to award another $3,000 prize. The contest, which had 161 entries from 36 countries this year, encourages creative solutions to global poverty. The spontaneous Judges' Choice award of $3,000 went to two brothers for their plan to help small-scale rice farmers in Mali earn a better living by providing storage, marketing and other post-harvest services. One of the brothers, Mohamed Ali Niang, grew up in Africa and is now studying at Temple's Fox School of Business.


March 12, 2010 | Agence France-Presse

Thousands of cardiologists from around the world descend on Atlanta to discuss the latest advances, treatments and care strategies to combat heart disease. Some of the 30 studies and trials hoping to grab the spotlight at this year's American College of Cardiology four-day meeting shed light on the effectiveness of new products to fight the number one killer in the United States. "Obviously the buzz word is comparative effectiveness at this conference and in Washington," Temple School of Medicine cardiothoracic surgeon James McClurken told reporters. "A lot of these trials are looking at what works with the least side effects and what works most affordably."

March 11, 2010 | 6ABC

Colleen LaRose — the woman known as "Jihad Jane" — had a difficult life. She married young, divorced twice, had several scrapes with the law, and, it appears, enjoyed to hit the bottle and hit it hard at times. "When you look into her background, she's had a troubled life, a really troubled life, one thing after another thing, after another thing," said Temple psychologist Frank Farley. She may have been searching for a purpose. "Getting involved in a group or an ideal or a movement can have an amazing effect on people's lives," Farley said.

March 10-11, 2010 | Washington Post, Associated Press, Philadelphia Inquirer, NBC4 (Washington, D.C.), more
Charles Blockson, curator emeritus of Temple University Libraries' Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, donated a trove of 39 Harriet Tubman artifacts to the Smithsonian Institution. Blockson, a leading authority on the Underground Railroad, has collected slave narratives, rare texts and thousands of artifacts related to black American history. More than 20,000 of his items were given to Temple, now the home of the Blockson Collection, "a major repository with hundreds of thousands of items.

March 10, 2010 | NBC10

Temple students joined students throughout the region for an alternative spring break community service project at Mill Creek Farm in West Philadelphia. The students worked on an organic farm, growing okra, tomatoes, onions, garlic, collard greens and more for sale at a local farmer's market.