Sara Schechner News Today

In the high-tech laboratory at the Arnold Arboretum’s Weld Hill Research Building, amid an array of expensive, shiny new equipment, sits a 1931 microtome, a machine whose well-oiled parts keep cranking out slices of tissue just 10 micrometers wide, thin enough for light to penetrate and perfect for making slides to see the internal cellular structure of plants.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was born in 1938 in Sugar City, Idaho. She graduated from the University of Utah in 1960 with a BA in English. That fall she moved with her husband, Gael Ulrich, to Boston, Massachusetts so he could begin graduate work at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). During the next ten years, while engaged with her growing family, she worked with a dynamic group of Mormon women to produce a popular guidebook to Boston (a fund-raising project for their local congregation) a...

Fast times during last Friday’s opening heats of the Scholastic Rowing Association of America national championship regatta on the Schuylkill River in…