USC Media and Public Relations

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The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that USC received a $100,000 grant recognizing its adoption of innovative ways to help faculty transition into their late careers. The grant, given by the American Council on Education and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, honored USC offerings including a course on writing an autobiography. Inside Higher Ed highlighted USC's Living History Project, which allows faculty to record and store their legacies for future generations, as well as work part-time or volunteer on campus to maintain links to the university. Bloomberg Businessweek also covered the grant.

KPCC-FM reported that the USC School of Pharmacy received the largest grant in its history: $12 million to improve the medical care of patients in underserved communities. The grant from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid will fund a program placing pharmacists alongside doctors in primary care clinics in low-income communities. The pilot program will start this summer in three Orange County clinics, and will later expand to primary care clinics in Los Angeles County.

The New York Times featured data drawn up by Lee Epstein of the USC Gould School and a colleague Washington University in St. Louis, about one-vote majority decisions in orally argued Supreme Court cases. From 1946 through 2010, justices issued one-vote majority opinions on 1,205 out of 7,259 cases. The statistics also revealed that Chief Justice John Roberts beat other chief justices for the greatest share of five-four splits.

Wired featured a robotic finger developed at the USC Viterbi School that can identify materials better than a human can. A study authored by Gerald Loeb of the USC Viterbi School and recent USC doctoral graduate Jeremy Fishel trained the finger on 117 common materials, including paper, wood and sponge. The finger's BioTac sensor reads vibrations on its skin's surface and matches them to materials it has on file. It can sense directional force and temperature, as well. There is potential to develop this technology into more effective prostheses, or use it in consumer product testing and personal assistive robots. The work was also covered by Asian News International, Daily Mail (U.K.), American Public Media's "Marketplace," ABC (Spain), Russia 24 (Russia), Moskovskij Komsomolets (Russia), Lenta (Russia), Rzeczpospolita (Poland), Magyar Tavirati Iroda (Hungary), a second Magyar Tavirati Iroda story, Hoy (Argentina), Antara News (Indonesia), Gizmag, The Verge, Ubergizmo and Geeky Gadgets.

United Press International featured a study by Sarah Feakins of the USC Dornsife College and colleagues, finding that ancient Antarctica was once much warmer and wetter than previously thought ... and that climate change could return it to those conditions. Examining the chemical information in leaf wax, the study's authors could discern what the climate conditions were like millions of years ago. Feakins told RadioLive's "Drive" (New Zealand) that summer temperatures around the study site would have been about 11 degrees warmer than they are today, with shrubs growing along the Antarctic coast. "We knew the Miocene was a warm period, but it was surprising how much vegetation we found evidence for," Feakins said. The research was also covered by KPCC-FM, Press TV (Iran), Stuff (New Zealand) and La Tercera (Chile).

The Huffington Post ran a column by Martin Kaplan of the USC Annenberg School on how people may turn to denial when they feel powerless, specifically with regard to climate change. The phenomenon's potential for catastrophe, no matter how real, leads many people to deny the whole thing, Kaplan wrote. "Suppose we faced the ecological bad news head on," Kaplan wrote. "We'd do everything we could to stop it, right?"

Business Insider ran a column by Ira Kalb of the USC Marshall School about how countries control their brands. Many countries tend to see other countries' brands as better, a result of "grass is greener" thinking, Kalb wrote. "This is one reason why foreign or exotic brands have so much appeal," he added.